Hey guys & girls (all genders),
I am currently creating a font with a lot of decorative ligatures for several different letter combinations (e.g. an, ar, aq, bd, li, …). in Illustrator.
My design process so far was the following:
1. Create all letters: A-Z, a-z, diacritics, numbers, punctation, …
2. Spacing and kerning: at first smart, and then a little fine-tune for all, Ab, AB, ab, …
3. Creating ligatures: based on the letter spacing, that was already created.
Now the next step would be to import the ligatures into my font + afterwards spacing and kerning.
Is there an appropriate way / process to do the spacing & kerning for the ligatures?
Example: ligature „an“
I would like to have:
- left side bearing from „a“
- right side bearing from „n“
- all kerning pairs related to „a“ (e.g. aan, ban, can, dan, ean, … )
- Is there a way to get that done automatically OR
- Do I have to read out all the values from „a“ and „n“ + type them in for the ligature „an“ manually?
- If I click „Smart Spacing / Kerning“ again, after I created & imported all my ligatures, will it destroy all my previous settings from Smart + my manual fine-tuning?
I would like to have Smart Spacing / Kerning where you can tick off „only ligatures“. (New feature?)
I just saw that there is the possibility to do smart spacing / kerning „only for letters that are typed in the spacing panel“ – so I would have to type approx. 150 ligature combinations into the spacing panel…
Any kind of tips / suggestions concerning the further process in my case would be very useful.
Thanks a lot in advance 
Florian