Kent Lew

Note that not all of the white glyphs in Ray’s image fall in these categories (depending upon how you define “and such” ;-). Some are required for additional, “living,” “minority” language support. (Kildin Saami or Khakass, for example.)

See also this conversation: http://typedrawers.com/discussion/1259/cyrillics-i-really-need-to-bother-with

That may well be true today, but it wasn’t always the case.

Historically, for example, see the Spanish fonts cut by Geronimo Gil for Joaquin Ibarra and the Real Academia edition of El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, published in Madrid in 1780 — one of the finest editions of this seminal Spanish-language epic.

It features very upright acute accents (probably influenced by previous generations of French and Dutch fonts used in Spanish printing heretofore). To address the matter of harmonizing native accents, we find a much more exuberant and volante tilde (rather laying down the acute ;-).

But, as Nick points out, overall vertical dimensions may play a part in such decisions, on a case by case basis.

Superscript ¹²³-only is a legacy from MacRoman Postscript Type 1 encoding. Older fonts from that period will tend to have only those three. (Sometimes you find a superscript 4, because one drew it anyway to compose the legacy three pre-built fractions from that same encoding: ¼½¾.)

Similarly, those fonts that include only a partial set of superior letters are often those born in the legacy era of expert fonts, where one typically only bothered with a subset that Adobe (I think) determined to cover the major ordinal designations — adehilmnorst, if I recall correctly.

As an aside, I do actually still work as a typographer on occasion.

P.S. But, in response to the title of this thread, I can’t make a living at it full-time. ;-)

In general, Ray is right. Adding Greek and Cyrillic glyphs to Latin classes adds very little (but not quite nothing) to the {kern} GPOS table.

The bloat only occurs if there is a class-glyph or glyph-class exception pair and the class has to be enumerated. In which case, that exception pair, which appears as one pair from a design standpoint, becomes several pairs from a font compilation standpoint.

If there are no exception pairs involving the multi-script class, then there is no bloat.