Tighten the kerning for a particular pair?

Question

I need to use the Palatino font in a website. The problem is that the font is missing an important kerning pair VA, at least on my machine:

It’s acceptable for me to just solve this situation in the main website heading. This means I can insert explicit markup (<span class="kern">VA</span>LUE) and adjust the kerning there. But adjusting the VA pair using the letter-spacing CSS property also tightens the following pair:

Now the AL pair is unacceptable (also see jsFiddle). What do I do?

Answer 1

I just created this project for exactly this purpose:

Jerning.com

Usage is simple - so for your example you would do the following:

$('p').jerning("VA", -0.1);

Which means you don't have to do manual editing of spans for large bodies of text.

Answer 2

Ha, I’m an idiot. Obviously, just target the first letter:

<p>VALUE</p>
<p><span class="kern">V</span>ALUE</p>

So much for rubber duck debugging.