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In his answer to this question, our friend @egreg explains:

It happens that certain combination of letters have “bad” spacing.

I have noticed this too. As I understand it, LaTeX is supposed to make producing beautiful documents easy, by taking care of the formatting for you, so that you can focus on the content.

Now, obviously, "good" and "bad" kerning is quite subjective - witness @egreg's scare quotes. And yet, in the linked example, I'd say the case is pretty clear cut.

So, I'm wondering if anybody knows of any references which explain the rationale behind LaTeX's kerning decisions.

Are there any plans to modify LaTeX's kerning behaviour, or is this behaviour desired?

Also, is there any package which allows you to systematically alter the kerning across the document - so that you don't have to fiddle around yourself on a case by case basis?

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    (La)TeX itself has no control over these kerns, they are a property of the font, you can in principle generate a virtual font with different specified kerns but to latex that is a completely different font unrelated to the original. – David Carlisle May 22 '15 at 21:59
  • Microtype can do that, and fontspec, I guess, can do it for opentype fonts (for xe/luaætex. But normally it is not latex's job: kerning the font author's job, and kerning is writtel in the .ot or .ttf font files. – Bernard May 22 '15 at 21:59
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    This may be doable with LuaTeX and XeTeX, but generally kerning is a property of the font (as David already mentioned). Don't do this; there are dragons. – Martin Schröder May 22 '15 at 22:33
  • Note that the bad kerning does not happen for the text font, even if you try italics: \textit{cC}. In math mode it's different, because different rules are used. If you note, the C in math mode is “rounder” than the text italic C. I added some more words about the subject. – egreg May 22 '15 at 22:33
  • For various possibilities of how to change the kerning (of text fonts), cf. this question. – Robert May 23 '15 at 01:08

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