Your periodic reminder that bad kerning distracted Donald Knuth from TAOCP for a decade or so, setting our industry back countless person-millennia. Do not trifle with kerning. It’s a different kind of Turing tarpit for software engineers.
When I started using the internet, I would read pom as porn given the horrible font and terminal I was using. It made for some really awkward misunderstandings.
Google ReCAPTCHA, back when it was about OCR'ing books, has apparently made that mistake with pom.xml --- no surprise, I bet 99% of people who saw a CAPTCHA saying "pom" thought it said "porn".
I've had similar isseus with some sans-serif fonts and uppercase letters joining together to form another letter. This might not be the best example but you get the idea... https://i.imgur.com/v2A3m4z.png
Nice game. But I find it frustrating not to be able to drag the last character. My experience is that well-kerned text takes up overall less horizontal space than unkerned text (i.e. most kerning adjustments are negative), so I'm not sure why this game doesn't allow me to change that overall width.
Consider that you're not starting from 'no kerning', but from deliberately bad kerning.
The overall width is a given because it tells you the tracking (letter-spacing) you're aiming for. It's common for this parameter to be user-selectable even when kerning is completely automatic (or to be automatically adjusted for the purpose of justification), so when you are the kerning algorithm, it's not your job to question that choice.
I can see how this can seem weird, as nominally you are responsible for deciding the overall width. But if you had to try to continue the tracking between the first two glyphs instead, or aim for e.g. "+20%", it would be much more difficult.
Being able to continuously deal with the feeling of "they want me to do WHAT!?" is one of the skills that distinguishes pro graphic designers from amateurs ;)
It might just be an accommodation for people who know little about typography.
I couldn't have done it if I'd been able to adjust the overall length because I had no intuition about how close the characters should have been in the various fonts, I took my cue from the total width.
I only did 2 words. The first word I almost perfectly nailed it. Only got 80/100. Second word I was further off, got 88/100. I don't understand the scoring.
Author here. I’ve been meaning to release a second version of the game, will probably tackle it in 2020 (this game is around eight years old and needs a complete rewrite to work on mobile)
It works on Firefox Mobile on Android. However, one has to switch from landscape to portrait mode back and forth to kern, and then to click on the next button.
