I've looked over all the relevant messages in this forum and done a fair bit of research online and I have yet to conclude that the PANOSE value for a font is really all that useful, but I certainly don't claim to even remotely be an expert on the matter. It seems like it had good intentions, such as helping to categorize fonts and make them more searchable, but beyond that, I'm not sure I understand the value of putting it together. Is there a really good reason to calculate it? Or can I just select the "Any" value for each category and move on? I would really appreciate hearing the thoughts of anyone who understands it better.
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Because there are a huge percentage of typefaces with no useful information in the Panose numbers people tend not to use it.
Because people tend not to use it typeface designers question the usefulness of putting any useful information in there.
Chicken and egg!
Importantly—at least this was true years ago, no idea if it is still so today—if you give a font a monospace flag in Panose, Microsoft Word will ignore the actual advance widths and treat it as monospaced.
Alternatively, you can use OTMaster to edit the entries (under OS/2 table).