Oh. I think perhaps I see the mistake I made here – I had added in all those various ligatures as “characters” rather than as “classes,” because each and every one of them were rather unique (being double, sometimes triple, “characters”), but then when I ran autokern it didn’t add in any adjustment pairs for any of them.
If I understand what you’re saying, though, if I add each of those ligs in as “classes” rather than as “characters” – even if each of those classes only contains one character, then autokern will then create adjustment pairs for each of them (in combination with all other glyphs, wherever appropriate)?
Can you explain what exactly the difference is between how much space you give between the glyph and it’s side bearings, and how much “glyph spacing factor” you give it when you run autometrics? I don’t quite get that, it seems like one is doing the same thing twice.
Optical Autometrics calculates the side-bearings for a limited number of glyphs automatically. The glyph spacing factor merely decides how tight the spacing will be. See this thread on > Optical Metrics >
I guess my confusion here is that if metrics adjusts the spacing between characters (and, as you point out in that thread, the latest versions of FC have a preview available, which certainly helps a lot), then what’s the point of even having side bearings at all in the first place? Like, when it comes to type design, what’s the point of it at all, if that gets “adjusted” later on when one figures out the metrics anyway? Why not just give everything L/R bearings of 0 (zero) and then let the metrics figure out the spacing between characters?
I feel like there must be something really rather basic and simple to this – and yet somehow I don’t seem to “get it.” 