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Comment by virtualritz | Hacker News Reader

As someone who studied typography, I disagree with many of the 'solutions' this game uses my kerning choices to grade against.

Even in professional software like InDesign, you can choose between ad-hoc calculated optical kerning and the resp. font's kerning.

These can differ considerably, depending on the intend and preferences of the typographer that designed the font and kerned it.

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Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t optical kerning a fallback option for fonts that have no special kerning rules? When would you use it over the font designer’s hand-specified kerning?

Not necessarily.

See my other comment here about kerning depending on font size.

A font may be kerned to be typeset at 10–16pt but you use it for headlines at 24p. The optical kerning may be better suited then.

The game is for a different purpose. Once you can get by eye the "book" kerning you can start breaking the rules.

Is there such thing as book kerning? My impression is that it's an artistic decision.

All my knowledge of keming came from roundabout sources, but I think there are some pretty serous sources. I've never gotten around to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_and_Typesetting but that's a pretty serious start.

There's the normal stuff about rivers and lakes, but from the game Toronto is a kinda funny one, To ronto, what's ronto? why are you going there? I think there's a good amount of looking for potential mis-parses, and making sure the reader never slips out of reading, and is forced to re parse.

Damn you.

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