Automatic creation of letter pairs for kerning of undefined pairs upon clicking

FontCreator - Font Editor FontCreator - Requests and Enhancements
1

Current behaviour:
In OpenType Designer, if there is a text available for quick view, if I click on a pair of letters that is created by choosing the first and the second letter from the list of available letters (even if it is blank), then FontCreator jumps to the corresponding pair for the purpose of kerning. If no such pair exists (not created from the list of letters yet), then FontCreator does not do anything.

Desired behaviour:
When a pair does not exist and I click on a pair in the Quick View section, then FontCreator can automatically generate a blank pair, colour-coded in red to indicate it is not defined yet, and jump to it. Any change to the kerning of the pair would be handled as always.

Reason for the suggested behaviour:
Often, fonts with many glyphs have a very long list of items to scroll through in order to get to the desired first and second letters in a pair for the purpose of kerning. There are times that a lot of pairs need to be created between tens of letters. This can be very tedious to be done one by one in the current workflow. The suggested behaviour allows a font designer to simply click on any pair of letters and verify two things:

1- If/that a pair exists, and
2- If/that the pair has correct kerning

All without going through a huge list of letters to construct a pair over and over again.

2

Are you familiar with kerning classes?

3

That’s a very good point. I actually used them in a different font editor.

Yet, I have come across many cases that a quick, automatic pair generation would have saved me a lot of time over and over. Perhaps, it was because the pair was not particularly a member of a larger class, and yet, it needed kerning. This happens specially when working with fonts created by other designers. They might have created several classes, and still a few corner cases were left out. Too many to do them one by one, too few to create a class for them.

Or, maybe I don’t know how to use classes to their extreme potentials. That’s also possible.

4

Jens Kutílek made an extension for Glyphs, which is a font editor for Mac. It allows you to apply kerning and edit spacing by dragging glyphs with your mouse.

MoveableSidebearings

Maybe some of those ideas could be added to the OpenType Designer?