A few years back I got interested in printing stuff and noticed that common tools (Word, Powerpoint, Illustrator, ...) get horrible results setting serifed fonts in large sizes. I figured out how to kern manually, but boy is it a hassle.<p>When I look at large numbers of posters printed by various organizations I find that people today hardly ever use serifed fonts to set titles and I think this is why.<p>The thing is I don't remember this being a problem with desktop publishing in the 1990s or the early 2000s (though then I was setting titles for a political organization with a novelty font that looked like the font used by Die Grünen.) I'm wondering if I was less picky then or if there has really been a regression, such as a patent troll outlawing good kerning.<p>I thought pretty seriously though about making my own kerning tables for a font I liked because you only need one for a system.