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glossary K
kappa Κ κ
Eleventh letter of the Greek Alphabet. The font Symbol most often used on American Computers to Type Cyrillic Letters places it in ASCII 75, the space for capital K. It looks exactly like a K.
kern
(noun) That portion of a letter which extends beyond its width, that is, the letter shapes that overhang — the projection of a character beyond its sidebearings. In many alphabets, the roman f has a kern to the right, the roman j a kern to the left, and the italic f one of each. (verb): To adjust the intercharacter spacing in character groups (words) to improve their appearance. Some letter combinations (“AV” and “To”, for example) appear farther apart than others because of the shapes of the individual letters. Many sophisticated word processors move these letter combinations closer together automatically.
kerning
The adjustment of horizontal space between individual characters in a line of text. Adjustments in kerning are especially important in large display and headline text lines. Without kerning adjustments, many letter combinations can look awkward. The objective of kerning is to create visually equal spaces between all letters so that the eye can move smoothly along the text. Kerning may be applied automatically by the desktop publishing program based on tables of values. Some programs also allow manual kerning to make fine adjustments.
keyboard layout / keyboard mapping
Sometimes known as a character mapping, a keyboard layout or mapping is a table used by a computer operating system to govern which character code is generated when a key or key combination is pressed.