Question: From what I see [here](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning), it seems kerning is just rearranging the space between letters. However, the comments [here](http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/1924/graphic-design/1929#1929) lead me to believe there's more to the story. Is kerning really that simple? Is the only purpose of it to look nicer or is there some practical reasoning for it?

Answer: 
I think the [Wikipedia kerning article](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning) essentially covers it, but the bulk of the article is about adding kerning information to a font during its design, or applications automatically using this built-in information to improve composition of a font's characters -- rather than the a fine-tuning a designer might do on a particularly problematic pair of characters in a headline.

As an example, say the revolutionary new product, the

*i*Vone
-------

was launched; that combination of italic/oblique and roman characters would probably not have been foreseen by the font designer, and so would require special treatment to avoid the dot of the i from colliding with the V.

Letter-letter, or letter-punctuation combinations that are only used in some languages are other situations that might require custom kerning by a designer.

Also to note, fonts contain widely varying amounts of kerning information - this is one of the key differentiators between amateur and professionally produced fonts, or even between different versions of the same font.
Yes, that is essentially it. [From Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning):

> 
> In typography, kerning (less commonly mortising) is the process of adjusting the spacing between characters in a proportional font, usually to achieve a visually pleasing result. In a well kerned font, the two-dimensional blank spaces between each pair of characters all have similar area. The related term kern denotes a part of a type letter that overhangs the edge of the type block.
> 
> 
> 

the point of making it looking nicer is the only point, but it can be *very* important for a clean-looking typeface. The Wikipedia page shows how massive the difference can be:

![alt text](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fVg91.png)