Common text controls: Kerning group

The Kerning group lets you to adjust the spacing between individual letters. Kerning provides precise spacing between letters that might sit too close or too far away from each other. This can be very important for titles or any composition that needs precise typography.

For example, if you take the word ‘Digital’ and look at it in most fonts, but Arial specifically, you’ll notice the space between the ‘t’ and the ‘a’ appears to be less than the space between the ‘a’ and the ‘l’. You might want to add a little bit more space before the ‘a’, and you would do this by kerning. Finding a way to allow you to do that was the first priority, animating that was a distant second.

What are common controls? Many of the Text plug-ins share parameters that behave the same. To avoid having to repeat these definitions, we cover them once here. If a parameter has special attributes in a plug-in, it will be further explained on that plug-in's manual page.

 

 

 

Kerning> Show Kerning Pair checkbox

Turns on a yellow line that allows you to visually see the two characters you are kerning between.

 

 

Kerning> Kerning Pair

This is the pair of letters you are kerning. If you have Show Kerning Pair turned on, you wi’ll see a yellow line between these two letters. Position the yellow line between the two characters you want to kern and then adjust Kerning Amount.

 

 

Kerning> Kerning Amount

Sets the amount of space between the characters. This value can either be negative or positive. If it is negative, then the characters may overlap. In fact you can make it so negative that the last character in the line becomes the first.

The Amount slider is not animatable. That’s because the Amount slider only relates to the specific pair of characters you have it pointed at. It's not possible for After Effects to account for all the possible pairs and allow you to set keyframes for them.

TIP: The tricky part is that you can only see a Kerning Amount when its Kerning Pair is active. In our example below, the seventh Kerning Pair is chosen and we see Kerning Amount at 24. If Kerning Pair is set to 6, then Kerning Amount will show its value for the sixth pair of characters.

 

Kerning Pair at 7, which is the 7th pair of letters. Kerning Amount is 24.