What it means
Kerning is the fine adjustment of space between a particular pair of letters. Type is designed on rectangular bodies, so some pairs — AV, To, Wa, P. — sit too far apart when their bodies simply touch; the designer builds a table of exceptions, called kerning pairs, that pulls them together (or occasionally pushes them apart). Good text faces carry hundreds or thousands of such pairs, and typesetting software applies them automatically.
Kerning is not tracking. Tracking (or letter-spacing) adds or removes the same amount of space between every letter in a range; it is used sparingly for small caps and headings, and letter-spaced lowercase is a classic mark of bad typesetting.
In body text, kerning is invisible when it works — which is the point. It becomes a manual craft in display sizes, where a headline's gaps are large enough to see and each pair may be nudged by eye.
In Bindery
Bindery typesets in LaTeX, which applies each font’s own kerning pairs automatically as it sets the text.
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