There's an art to spacing your letters. It's called kerning and is often spoken about in the relationship between two letters, or kern pairs. (It's got nothing to do with an old Scottish couple pulling faces. That's gurn pairs.)
It's the art of moving the type in and out from each other to make the font look good, or "have good colour". It's the opposite of having a rigidly set and unchanging distance between every letter. I don't know much more about it other than the following.
A normal quality font will have between 200 and 500 pre-built kern pairs and a high quality font can have up to a thousand. I know that capital A and capital V should be drawn in together a bit if they're next to each other, and that 'Clint Eastwood' should never be capitalised, for fear of it being misread at a distance.
There's an ultimate form of mal-kerning at a set of lights near my place that always makes me smile. I'm not sure why, it's not even logical. In a hand-built sign, where the owner has put each letter on a seperate sheet of A4, he's gone a bit big with his 'O'. It really looks like you're staring in the window of a 'Factory Cutlet'.
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