Heavy same-direction kerning — fix the sidebearing instead
Audit code: kerning-suggests-spacing
Definition
This glyph is kerned against many partners on the same side, mostly in the same direction, by sizeable amounts — the classic signature of a spacing problem wearing a kerning costume. If V needs -40 against a, e, o, c, d, g and friends, V's sidebearing is wrong; tighten it once by about half the median kern and most of those pairs disappear. Spacing first, kerning for the exceptions — in that order.
How Patens surfaces this
The Patens audit module checks for kerning-suggests-spacing across five teaching surfaces: the edit-panel inline issue list, the
project-wide audit page, the release pre-flight check, the family hub,
and the home-page project tile. Every surface shows the same plain-English
explanation and links back to this page. This rule is detection-only — there's no automatic fix because the
correction is design-dependent (it requires a judgment call about the
glyph's intended shape or the font's intended behaviour). The audit
message links to the specific glyph or field that needs attention.
Run this check yourself
Patens runs every audit rule live as you draw — including this one.
The editor (in private alpha) shows kerning-suggests-spacing firing on real
glyphs, or check your own work from the CLI:
npx patens audit your-project.font.jsonCanonical references
Primary literature where this rule is established or explained. Drawn from the open-licensed corpus — browse the full 42-source canonical library or read the research artifact.
The canonical authority for this rule sits in the in-copyright craft canon (Tracy, Smeijers, Noordzij, Cheng) which requires licensing before body-text ingestion. We cite these by bibliographic reference only — see the library for the full 42-source canon, or the research artifact Section 2 for the family-specific citation matrix. Q3 2026 work expands the corpus once publisher relations land.