Sometimes the space between certain pairs of characters, such as Ta and AV, is noticeably too wide. This spacing is traditionally tightened or kerned by typesetters to improve the appearance and readability of the text. With RSG, you can manually kern any single pair of characters (known as a kerning pair) by specifying how much space to remove from between them. You do this by selecting the second character in the pair and shifting it to the left toward the first character. You can kern in thousandths of an em. Many fonts have built-in specifications for kerning pairs of characters. You can use these specs to automatically kern pairs of characters. This is described later in this chapter.

1. Select the second character of a pair that you want to kern. You may find it helpful to magnify your text. Choose Views from the Document menu, and then choose Double Size. This works best when your system contains the font at double the size of the character pair.

2. Choose Horiz Spacing from the Format menu. The Horizontal Spacing dialog box appears with the Kern option selected.

3. Type the amount of space that you want to remove in the Amount box. You can type from .001 to .5 ems.
   The size of an em varies. It is the same width as the current type size-for example, in 10-point type an em is 10 points wide. So the amount of space that you remove depends on the size of the type and the amount of ems you specify (type size x thousandths of an em).

4. Click Apply to see the results. The selected character moves to the left the amount you specified, and the following text adjusts to fit.
   RSG makes each kerning adjustment as part of the overall adjustment of horizontal spacing, which includes specified manual kerning for pairs and autokerning, specified manual tracking and autotracking, and letterspacing.

5. Click OK when you're finished.

To kern a pair .05 em at a time, select the second character in the pair you want to kern. Hold down the Command key and press the left arrow key. Each press removes .05 from the left of the selected character.
To remove the effects of kerning, select the second character of the pair whose kerning you specified and choose Horiz Spacing from the Format menu. Type 0 in the Amount box and click OK. Select Auto Kern from the Format menu and choose Off.
Removing the kerning specs may not return the pairs to normal spacing if specified tracking, autotracking, and letterspacing are in effect.