Batarde, the French Gothic cursive with its slanted, compressed forms, lives or dies on its rhythm, and rhythm in script is kerning: the space between letters. Unlike roman capitals, where kerning is about fitting shapes together, batarde's kerning is about maintaining a consistent spatial beat while the letters themselves vary wildly in width. The geometry is not about equal distances; it is about equal visual weight of whitespace, letter after letter, at speed.
Why Batarde Kerning Is Its Own Problem
Batarde letters are narrow, slanted, and full of entry and exit strokes that reach into the neighboring letter's space. An m sprawls; an i barely exists; and the connecting strokes mean the letters are never truly separate. Measuring kerning as the gap between letter bodies misses the point, because in batarde the bodies overlap in the horizontal dimension. The space that matters is the counter-space: the white shapes trapped between the strokes.
The script's slant adds a second complication. At batarde's steep angle, the vertical dimension of whitespace reads as strongly as the horizontal. Two letters can be correctly spaced horizontally but feel crowded because their slanted strokes create a dense diagonal band of black with too little white relief. Kerning in batarde is two-dimensional in a way upright scripts are not.
The Counter-Space Method
Instead of measuring gaps, look at the white shapes between letters and aim for consistency of their area and character. Each inter-letter space in batarde should present roughly the same amount of white, in roughly the same kind of shape: a slanted parallelogram echoing the script's angle. When the counters are even, the word reads with a steady beat; when they vary, the rhythm stumbles.
Practice this by writing words slowly and then examining the white, not the black. Cover the letters with your thumb and look only at the spaces; uneven counters jump out when the letters stop distracting you. This is a trainable perception, and it transfers to speed once the eye knows what even looks like.
Letter Pairs That Need Special Attention
Certain combinations fight even kerning. Narrow letters next to narrow letters (il, in) need slightly more space than the eye first suggests, because their combined thinness creates a dense dark cluster. Wide letters next to wide letters (mm, ww) need slightly less, because their openness already contributes white. Round letters (o, e, c) tuck into their neighbors; their curves create natural white space that counts toward the kerning, so they sit closer.
- Watch the entry and exit strokes; they occupy kerning space invisibly.
- Ascenders and descenders affect perceived density; a tall d next to a short e needs compensation.
- Word spaces should be clearly wider than letter spaces but not so wide the word falls apart; roughly the width of a narrow letter.
- Check kerning at reading distance, not with your nose on the page; kerning is a reading phenomenon.
Speed Versus Consistency
Batarde was a working script, written fast for documents, and its kerning was maintained by practiced rhythm rather than measurement. The goal for the modern student is to internalize the spacing beat so it survives at speed. This comes from slow, deliberate practice where the counters are consciously evened, repeated until the hand produces even counters without the eye's supervision.
Drill with pangrams and repetitive letter combinations, not just beautiful words. The boring combinations are where kerning breaks down, because the hand has no aesthetic investment in them. If minimum kerns evenly, the pretty words will take care of themselves.
Correcting Kerning in Finished Work
When a finished piece has a kerning flaw, resist the urge to squeeze a correction in; added strokes in batarde almost always look added. If the flaw is minor, leave it; hand lettering is allowed its humanity, and one slightly tight pair in a page of good rhythm is invisible to everyone but the writer. If the flaw breaks the word's rhythm, rewrite the word. Batarde forgives many things, but it does not forgive a stumble in its beat.
Kerning in batarde is the geometry of white shapes at a slant, maintained by rhythm and checked by covering the black. Get the counters even and the script sings; let them wander and even perfect letterforms cannot save the line.
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