There seems to be renewed interest in my fonts recently, I'm not sure why. But it's spurred me to go back to updating them for the modern world. Now that I'm not restricted to 224 usable character slots, I've been expanding them a bit, adding new ligatures and features. But now comes the tedious part: kerning all the new glyphs.

For each new letter or ligature, I have to put it next to every other letter which might reasonably be expected to appear next to it (on either side) and make sure it looks good — and tweak the kerning if they don't. This is especially important if there's an overhang or underhang ("To" will require a tighter kerning than "Th", for example). For period-style typefaces, reproducing the look of lead type, one would expect that there wouldn't be much need for kerning — with solid type, you can't shove the 'o' under the overhang of the 'T', after all — but since the better foundries would often cast special type for such cases, you should kern for the best-looking result anyway.

That's just the tedious part, though. The tough part is getting the OpenType features in there and making sure they work right. While there are a couple of applications which support OpenType ligatures — InDesign, for example, or the Linux version of Firefox — I haven't found anything yet that supports all the OpenType features (like initial/medial/terminal forms of the same letter). It's hard to be sure everything's set up right when there's nothing that actually displays them yet.