When my Canon Mega-tank printer ink absorber was full/fully saturated, Canon said there was no way to repair it and I just had to buy a new printer. I found online videos how to replace it or clean it, but it was messy and might not work anyway. I replaced it with a new Canon G3260 that also has refillable ink reservoirs, but now has an easily replaceable ink absorber that Canon sells for about $10. They also gave me a discount when I bought the printer. The previous printer paid for itself because the ink (from Canon) cost about 1/10 the price of an equivalent amount of ink in my previous printer. I am an adjunct professor and print a lot and was spending about $300 per year on ink cartridges before my previous Mega-tank printer.

This is one of my preserved black carpenter ants that I staged for a focused stacking session using the 5X magnification microscope objective mounted on a bellow as the optic for the camera.

I like black backgrounds because they are easy to produce by keeping the light close to the subject while being sure that there is nothing behind it to reflect light back to the lens. I shoot my sessions with the room lights off and I have a piece of black felt fabric hanging on the wall about ten feet past the specimen. Because the intensity of light diminishes to the square of the distance, by the time any light does hit the fabric it appears black. All that is left to do is to adjust the contrast, do a bit of cleanup, and the black background is created such as in this session.

Sorry, that is not "kerning"—it's just a good example that a variable-width typestyle is being used, as opposed to a mono-spaced font where each 10-character-line would be the same length.

"Kerning" is the adjustment of spacing between any two letters, punctuation mark, or symbols to make the space between all elements appear even. Each character of a variable width font is given a specific width to accommodate its planned design. This includes a small amount of whitespace on each side of the letter that when combined with the whitespace on the side of the adjoining letter will give the appearance of even spacing as the word is assembled. Thus, a straight vertical edge of a letter will usually have a little more space than a curved letter like an "o."

This works for most letter combinations but then there are the oddball combinations like: AWA ATA AVAVAT A" Too Two AT, "one."

AAAAAAAAAAAA
VVVVVVVVVVVV
AVAVAVAVAVAV

VVVVVVVVVVVV............
V.V.V.V.V.V.V.V.V.V.V.V.

TTTTTTTTTTTToooooooooooo
ToToToToToToToToToToToTo

............""""""""""""
."."."."."."."."."."."."

AAAAAAAAAAAAA""""""""""""
A"A"A"A"A"A"A"A"A"A"A"A"


To handle the oddball combinations, the type font may contain a kerning table that includes a set of rules and/or a listing of actual pairs of letters giving the exact number of units of space to be removed from between each combination of letters listed. The kerning table may include thousands of pairs depending on the needs of the design. Most modern fonts contain kerning tables and most modern applications use them but sometimes the option needs to be turn on. Previously disk space and the computing power needed to use and display the results was a concern. Not so much today.

We'll see how the examples actually post. Most of the examples show kerning as I type with the exception of the quotes following the period. That just means that the font currently being used doesn't have a definition for that pair. The font I use most often would have moved the end quotes over the period somewhat so that the quotes don't look like they are just hanging out in nowhere land. If it was a personal font I'd probably go into it with a font editor and add the pair to the table, but when you are on the web, you just usually have to take what you get!