It reduces the spacing between particular pairs of letters where the overlap doesn’t cause collisions, such as between the T and the A and between the L and the Y in the second line of the following picture: Technically, kerning is not simply condensing the spaces between letters. In most cases, it eliminates large gaps between words. Very long words are thereby compressed or expanded to fit in or fill up available space on the line. The maximum and minimum amount of compression and expansion that is applied is user settable. In that program, the kerning automatically adjusts compression/expansion of letter spacing rather than word spacing. The Corel WordPerfect program that I used in the past has several nice features that I miss in Words, among them the adjustable kerning. If a line contains several very long words, the space between them becomes large and it results in an ugly, ragged-looking text. The kerning available in Word only adjusts spaces between words.
Either automatic or manual hyphenation (found on the Layout ribbon) will also help. Older versions of Word used only expanded spaces, which turned out very poor typography current versions tend to prefer compression.
What Word does is compress or expand the spaces between words to create the justification. Kerning isn’t used automatically for justified text. This is meant primarily for use with large fonts (headings, large signs, and so forth) but you can set the lower limit as you wish. The option is turned off by default, and you must check the box to turn it on. Word does have a kerning ability, found on the Advanced tab of the Font dialog box: Thanks for your feedback, it helps us improve the site. To notify us and have us get back to you, simply reply to this post. You can post your feedback through this link. Our developers will collate and review suggestions and incorporate them into product planning discussions. Since the feature is not available in Word application, we highly suggest that you submit this idea to our Word UserVoice page. Thank you for raising this concern to our attention. Will it ever be provided? A Microsoft support person used the Remote Access Session to try to find it in Word, but it is not available. WordPerfect allows automatic kerning (letter space) adjustment between settable min & max limits to smooth this out, creating better-looking text. While using justified text, there are often large spaces between words.