

Professional typesetting systems and fonts allow fine-grained adjustments for such letter pairs. These letter pairs often look awkward together, and need to either be moved closer together, or further apart manually. Examples of letter pairs that need kerning treatment are AV, AY, PA, and AT. Kerning is the process of selectively adjusting the spacing between letters pairs to improve the overall appearance of text.

It supports unicode and all the advanced typographic features of OpenType and AAT fonts, like Adobe Garamond Pro and Hoefler Text. The software I use to write in L AT EX on a Mac compiles documents in PDF format (but exporting to other formats such as RTF or HTML is also possible). L AT EX is a free typesetting system that allows you to focus on content without bothering about the layout: the software takes care of the actual typesetting, structuring and page formatting, producing documents of astonishing elegance. There is still a further reason that definitely convinced me to abandon MS Word when I wrote my dissertation: you will never be able to produce professionally typeset and well-structured documents using most WYSIWYG word processors. There are several reasons why one should prefer L AT EX to a WYSIWYG word processor like Microsoft Word: portability, lightness, security are just a few of them (not to mention that L AT EX is free). February 2015: Featured in Hacker Monthly.
