Beguiling Bigrams
Keebs?
Keyboard users in Mexico typing in marginalized languages might experience frustrated phalanges.
A few years ago I collaborated with a linguist and built a CLI tool for processing a large corpus.
Chary is a toolset for the corpus to keyboard analysis pipeline. Includes tools for counting bigrams, getting unicode character counts, calculating fitness scores and manipulating a large corpus.
In our case this corpus was a decade worth of newspapers for an emerging language that recently developed a writing system and had been force fed an IBM keyboard layout. Unfortunately with all the diacritics in their writing system using this western technology meant inefficient and tedious chorded keystrokes. The tool was written in Go-lang and looked for frequently occurring bigrams. This data was then fed into an evolutionary algorithm in the hopes we could find more optimal layouts allowing folks to express themselves more ergonomically.
You know what else bigrams are useful for? Kerning!
Kerning?
Kerning comes from the French word "carne," meaning "corner." It originated in the days of metal typesetting when letters on metal blocks had corners that could overlap, creating uneven spacing. To fix this, they cut away those corners, or "kerned." Today, it's the process of adjusting letter spacing for better visual balance in typography, whether it's in print or digital design.
Problematic pairings decrease visual harmony
In general, use a sense of balance and visual harmony to adjust spacing — note the pieces of the letters. And here a few pairings to watch out for.
| Bigram | Notes |
|---|---|
| AV | The sharp angles of the "V" character against the "A" yields issues with spacing feeling too tight. VA has the same issue. |
| WA | The rounded bottom of the "W" can make it necessary to adjust the spacing with adjacent letters, such as "A." |
| TY | The combination of "T" and "Y" can sometimes look odd if not kerned properly, especially if the "T" has a wide crossbar. |
| Fi | These can have spacing issues due to the unique shape of the "F." |
| WV | The combination of "W" and "V" can be challenging because both letters have unique shapes. |
| LJ | The combination of "L" and "J" can be visually problematic due to the distinctive shapes of these letters. |
| TZ | The combination of "T" and "Z" may require kerning adjustments, especially if the "T" has a wide crossbar. |
| LT | The combination of "L" and "T" can sometimes appear uneven if not kerned appropriately. |
| RY | The curves and tails of "R" and "Y" can interact in ways that require careful kerning. |
| PO | The combination of "P" and "O" may need kerning adjustments, especially if the "P" has a large counter (the enclosed space within the letter). |
| FU | The combination of "F" and "U" can have spacing challenges due to the unique shape of the "F." Oh an maybe FU is not a nice thing to say — but this is unrelated to kerning. |
Want some practice?
Play the kerning game.