Just for the sake of clarity I'm using Linux Mint 17, with TeX Live. I'm using TeXworks to edit my TeX code. Here is the LaTeX code I'm using:
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
Very Keen Katz
\end{document}
The problem I've noticed is that kerning seems to be very poor in my output. I say "seems" because, since I'm kind of a TeX neophyte, I'm not sure if my issues is merely typographical ignorance. I don't think that's the case here, but one can never be certain.
With all that out of way, here's a screenshot I made to show the issue I'm having:
(I apologize for the small red lines, but since we're talking about rather small margins, I didn't want the lines to hide the issue.)
Anyway, the first row is a screenshot of the output from pdfLaTeX. In the second row, I basically manually kerned the output in the first row using GIMP. The third row is a semi-separate issue (that might be related) that I'll get to in a moment. So if you look at the first row, you can see that in "Very" the "e" is at least partially kerned, there a slight overlap between the edge of the "V" and it. However, in "Keen" there does not appear to be any kerning whatsoever. I am not sure if that is just how it's supposed to be, or if I'm doing something wrong, but it certainly doesn't look right to my eyes.
Now, getting to the third issue, if you'll take a look at the "V" you'll see that the bottom descends a little below the "underline" (I'm not sure what the right term is) of "ery". In the third row, I tried to manually fix this. Now, is that just how "V" is supposed to look in Computer Modern, or is there something wrong here?
Ve
like big black lumps. They are really too close.microtype
. It does some magic to the text.