Frank Grießhammer explain what creates an overflow in a kern table and what we can do about it. From the 2013 ATypI conference in Amsterdam.
It is quite common for modern fonts to contain a great number of kerning pairs. Despite modern tools, kerning still is tedious work for the type designer. After all the kerning is done, getting the pairs to work in font files (without experiencing overflow, or losing pairs along the way) is another challenge. I will speak about the major changes made in the Adobe kern feature generator (part of the Adobe FDK), which has been re-written from the ground up; contains better control of exceptions, more subtables and is now compatible with a modern, UFO-based type production workflow.