Best practice for kerning?

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QH FIQH 
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QJ FEQJAKUQE 
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QL TAQLID 
QM LUQMAN 
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QP MAQPIATO 
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QW ACQWYTE 
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QZ AHMAQZAI 
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RF SURFACE 
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RH PERHAPS 
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RL WORLD 
RM FORMER 
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RQ TORQUE 
RR CARRIED 
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RT PARTNER 
RU TRUE 
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RX MARXIST 
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RZ SCHERZO 
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SA UNSAFE 
SB HUSBAND 
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SF SUCCESSFUL 
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TB FOOTBALL 
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TF PLATFORM 
TG OUTGOING 
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Andres Torresi said:

should I set lowercase f with a negative right-hand side-bearing, so that most lowercase letters need no kerning,

I guess spacing an f against quotes will require kerning against anything that sits around the x height (all punctuation, hyphens, all lowercase). It doesn’t feel like a good idea to me but I can’t say it’s wrong. And I will think that the most common error would be missing exceptions. What’s worse to miss? An f parenthesis clash or an fa looking far apart and breaking words?

This dilemma exactly is the reason why the design of the outlines and the spacing are not really separate steps.
In the days of hot metal typesetting, this was solved by designing the letters so they didn't overhang their sidebearings at all (it wouldn't have been possible). This is especially noticeable in the Italic f, which had to be restricted both on the left and the right side.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that you can also solve those situations by changing the design of your letters. You could also make a version of the f with a longer swash that is automatically swapped in when there isn't a critical glyph next to it. The spacing would then work on all systems, and look nicer on systems that support contextual alternates. In web design, this is called progressive enhancement.

John Hudson said:

PS. Why are some pairs in asterisks? Are they assumed non-existent in the wild?

They are pairs for which I have not found examples. Probably they don’t occur, but I assume nothing.

Some of those asterisked pairs are the examples, i.e., are used on their own.  ⟨Hg⟩ and ⟨Pb⟩, for instance, are the chemical symbols for mercury and lead respectively (of course, they can also be used in longer sequences such as HgCl₂ for mercuric chloride).  ⟨Hz⟩ is the frequency unit the hertz (which likewise may occur in sequences such as kHz and MHz).  ⟨Rx⟩, based on the symbol ⟨℞⟩ (U+211E), sometimes occurs in pharmaceutical contexts, including brand names (e.g., the ballyhooed TrumpRx[.gov]).  ⟨Qb⟩ — apparently pronounced like the English names of those two letters — is the name of a video game I happen to own a copy of (not to be confused with Q*bert, officially spelled with that asterisk, which nevertheless often gets omitted anyway).

Iʼm not aware of real‐life usage of ⟨Qp⟩ on its own, but it does appear at the beginning of the punny title of a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, “Qpid”, in which the recurring character Q (by character I mean a dramatis persona, not the letter itself) plays matchmaker in over‐the‐top fashion.

And Star Trek opens up some further instances from the Klingon language; in its Latin orthography, letter casing is used distinctively, and some of the asterisked sequences can be found mid‐word, for example:
 • ⟨Dp⟩: HoDpuʼ (“captains”)
 • ⟨Dt⟩: naDtaʼ (“commended, praised”)
 • ⟨Hc⟩: HeghmoHchuʼ (“is/​are perfectly fatal”)
 • ⟨Hg⟩: loʼlaHghach (“value, usefulness”)
 • ⟨Hq⟩: taHqeq (a crass insult)
 • ⟨Qb⟩: taQbeʼ (“isnʼt/​arenʼt weird”)
 • ⟨Qj⟩: yuQjIjQaʼ (“United Federation of Planets”)
 • ⟨Qp⟩: DuQpuʼ (“stabbed”)
 • ⟨Qq⟩: ʼoyʼnaQqoq (“so‐called painstick”)
Of course, perhaps such vocabulary is not typically foremost in mind in designing a font…​I suppose it depends on just how, er, universal the font is to be.

I generally kern more pairs than strictly necessary in real-world use, but I find it’s easier than evaluating the usage likelihood of every pair. However, I rarely kern math characters or most symbols, and never tabular figures. I also never kern against the space character, as much as it may make sense, since it’s inconsistently supported by apps and operating systems (at least it was at one time—not sure if it’s still true).