Take the letter combination VA. If you look closely, you can see that the A kind of sneaks underneath the V - the bottom left corner of the A is further left than the bottom right corner of the V, and the diagonal strokes of the two letters are parallels at short distance. Other fonts don’t do this:
VA
Here, the A starts (on the horizontal axis) after the V ends, creating a visible gap between the two letters.
Is there a term of art to describe these properties in a font?
Its called kerning. Its both to minimise wasted space in a line, and to provide a more consistent patterning of spaces, which should help readability.
As usual Wikipedia - Kerning will tell you much more than you want to know.
In InDesign, it’s called “Tracking.” It can used to reduce space to fit in more words, and can also be increased to make a Headline look more stylish.
The Wikipedia article distinguishes kerning from tracking. “In typography, kerning is the process of adjusting the space between two specific characters, or letterforms, in a font. It is not to be confused with tracking, by which spacing is adjusted uniformly over a range of characters.”
When it’s done wrong, it’s called ‘keming’
Relevant
Typefaces have in built kerning, which sets the spacing between different combinations of letters - ie the spacing between, say, two ‘oo’s would be set tighter than two ‘ii’s, because of the visual gaps that are created by the curves. Any decent designer will also manually adjust the kerning in large headlines (or logos), as the tech isn’t perfect. You can test you kerning skills in games such as this one
That’s funny!
I was amused recently by this vaguely related controversy about the HBO logo. It’s an interesting couple of minutes. And the good guy wins.
You can call something like “VA” a “kerning pair.” Many typefaces store additional spacing information for certain combination of letters, much in the same way they may have extra letterforms to accommodate for ligatures.
Here’s an article about the kerning issues with the White House briefing room sign.
Yeah, good one! 
Then there are the scammers who take advantage of ‘keming’ by registering bogus domains such as
rnicrosoft[dot]com
…to scam people (that bogus URL is probably deactivated, but I wouldn’t go testing it).
To hijack for a second, those types of scams are one of the reasons I like Bitwarden (or even you browser’s build in password manager). Even if the URL looks right, if it’s not actually right, nothing will get autofilled and it should clue you in that maybe that email wasn’t actually from Amazon or Microsoft etc.
Typewriters had no kerning, which is why typed material looked so different from printed material. Typewriter fonts still exist; they’re known as monospaced fonts. Courier is probably the most famous, but here’s a whole page of them.
Which is something that played a major role in a news-media embarrassment twenty years ago.
(Anyone with desktop publishing experience knew AT A GLANCE that these things didn’t come out of a typewriter.)
I agree. Having done setups and troubleshooting for PC’s when they first came out, plus played with typewriters before that - everyone should have known that small superscript on typewriters was pretty much non-existent. I knew tht as soon as I saw it. How that passed the first smell test for people whose whole life was the press, I don’t know. Probably because a lot of them never typed their own material for years. It’s possible that a specialized selectric ball existed for shifted “st” “nd” “rd” “th” but selectrics were sufficiently expensive at the time that only higher end offices dealing with the public would be using them. I never saw anything like that.
The IBM Selectric Composer introduced in 1966 produced camera-ready copy using proportional width fonts. Standard Selectric’s used constant width fonts.
I’m friends with several graphic designers who mostly deal with type. Man, they can get bitchy about a mere event poster, probably designed by someone’s 16 yr old brother.
Typeface nerds are ruthless.
As a typeface nerd for going on 4 decades*, I thank you for saying ‘typeface’ and not ‘font’.
*I used to actually cast my own lead type, amongst other eccentricities.