Default kerning around hyphens is ugly

Question

I have noticed that default kerning of hyphenated words (like "Finite-Valued") looks like this:
e-V

As you can see, the hyphen is too close to the e and too far away from the V. Is there a way to fix this, so the hyphen has proper kerning?

Mico · Answer

The kern primitive is your friend.

documentclass{article}
begin{document}
Finite-Valued

Finitekern0.5pt-kern-2ptVkern-1.5ptalued % 1 postive kern, 2 negative kerns
end{document}

wipet · Answer

If you are using LuaTeX then you can declare more kerning pairs of used fonts. Example shows how to do it in OpTeX:
fontfam[lm]

directlua
  {fonts.handlers.otf.addfeature 
    {
    name = "khv",
    type = "kern",
    data = {
    ["-"] = { ["V"] = -150},
    }
  }
}

Finite-Valued.

setff{khv}rm Finite-Valued.

bye

2 Answers