Hrant H. Papazian

Well one issue is technical limits. I remember during the production of Ernestine they were pretty severe for a font with many glyphs. But from what I understand things have improved since then?

The more interesting issue is what to bother kerning at all. Here I recommend kerning as much as you have time and stamina for. Even something like "¿ß" can happen in text, but it might not be worth it. This makes for very fuzzy decisions...

Probably the best way to limit things is deciding a threshold below which not to kern. Mine is 5 units, in an Em of 1000. In comparison, I use a threshold of 2 when determining sidebearings.

Andreas Stötzner said:

Do very careful spacing of all glyphs first.

But ideally while keeping in mind how kerning will eventually kick in; for example I let glyphs touch (although rarely). This is because environments that don't care enough to enable kerning probably look worse in more important ways...

I just remembered this:
http://typedrawers.com/discussion/2034/optical-correction-in-arabic-monoline/p1

Interesting observation.

I like it.

>  Instead, we have a silly symbol that was never used.

Never say never. Alliances come and go.

Christian Thalmann said:

I've started working on the connected pipe version

Run with it!