I found a few posts on this topic, but not many examples of pairs to kern.
I looked at a few standard Windows fonts. Tahoma and Verdana include cT and eT, but that is about all. Calibri has loads of pairs, but none for lowercase/uppercase.
Scottish names like McAlister or McVitie might benefit from them, and some other words like OpenType or TrueType.
What do others consider best practice here?
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Also, of course, is the question of whether you want to support the increasingly-ubiquitous use of CamelCase in branding.
Personally, I'd think the easiest solution would simply be to kern those problematic pairs which you can actually identify as being in common use, and then adopt a EULA which allows users to add their own kerning pairs. That way the graphic designers at (purely hypothetical) MaxTech Inc. will be happy without you having to worry about every obscure pair.
Certainly the worst practice though is refusing to kern lc-UC at all. An escape from responsibility, post-rationalized from the metal era (which is bogus to begin with however, since kerning and filing were common).
https://typedrawers.com/discussion/comment/35275
And not just that, but any modification. I find EULAs that prohibit modification to be generally unethical.
Since FontCreator automates the process, I could easily add thousands of pairs, but I don't want to bloat my fonts any more than they are already.
Don't trust that.
You could look to lists of common pairs irrespective of case. Also, commonly-last letters followed by commonly-first (like "sJ"). Any instance-based approach is not rigorous enough in my view.
They can also add more languages... So personally instead of covering hundreds of languages with inferior kerning I would cover fewer better.
And new proper names have a way of popping up... Not least among under-represented groups.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-43821512
With most typography now happening online, you can no longer expect the users to manually kern these pairs when they occasionally appear. There is no practical way to manually kern the comment section on your website, for example.
BTW 21 is pretty chunky. (And a funny-seeming number; why not 20?)
After trimming, there were 598 pairs in this bold typeface.
It looks like your Em is bigger than 1000, I presume 2048? Then 20 isn't too chunky. Certainly that "aD" shouldn't get a kern.
I'm surprised almost 90% ended up with a kern. Speaks to the need for a methodic (versus instance-based) approach I would say. Or it speaks to the need of not over-extending oneself, not sure... :-)
Alternatively, one spaces the caps more like the lowercase, and uses a 'cpsp' feature to loosen the all-caps settings, and prays that one’s users actually use all-caps formatting and get that spacing, appropriate height dashes, etc.
Which is also why even if I type all-caps text, I try to also remember to still format as all-caps, to get adjusted spacing and shifted punctuation.
Since blanket loosening can wreak havoc with boundary conditions (like the right side of the "L") it's better to just positive-kern everything that needs it; the good news is you will nicely subsume the pairs that needed loosening to begin with. Also, any user savvy enough to deploy sophisticating formatting is savvy enough to simply track all-caps looser (if necessary) anyway.
Most of the pairs that are not trimmed are positive values. Those in green are negative values, those in blue are positive, any that are zero are shown in red.
Automation does most of the donkey work, but there are still a number of pairs that need manual adjustment, typically those with overhang like oT or aY. Those with hyphen are particularly prone to error so I give them to their own subtable. One uses shift+left/right cursor to adjust pairs by 100 funits or ctrl+left/right to adjust by 1 funit. With no modifier the step is 10 funits.
FontCreator 12 can generate a cpsp feature as a percentage of funits/em or as a percentage of advance width. I use 5% of advance width, which adds 2.5% to each side-bearing.
BTW the sidebearings in your "a" above seem suspect.
Of course. Swazi, for example, has accented letters (acute) followed by capital letters mid-word. They are prone to collide. Most of the mentioned above obviously have the tittle above j and i to consider as well. Maybe if Apple kills iTunes, you can get a break
PS: Irish written in ALL CAPS sometimes use small caps for the eclipsis prefix.