Here are some comments:
1. The hidden Path command were also available in CS2 (at least this is when I encountered them, and been spilling their secret hiding-place since).

2. Although hidden, in CS3 the hidden Path commands (and some other) will show-up in the Quick Apply interface, so you can get to them and run them without assigning shortcuts that you then have to remember. For example, to connect 2 selected endpoints, press Command/Ctrl+Return to display the Quick Apply panel, type “connect”, scroll to and select “Object Menu:Path>Connect”.

3. InDesign contains some “embedded” hidden shortcuts, which are so secret that they’re not even listed in the keyboard shortcuts interface (or poster), so you must dig them out from the shortcuts documentation in the InDesign help.
Two of those are the “Increase kerning between words” and “Decrease kerning between words”, which is basically the starting point of what Teacup’s Type Fitter plug-in does, only the PI affords much more robust features (I’ve been using it since the CS days).

4. Using optical kerning, especially on justified text, will cause the layout process to become much heavier and will result in slower more sluggish behavior. Apply justification values for Letter Spacing and Glyph Scaling, and it becomes worse. And the slower your machine is, the more you suffer.
From my point of view, optical kerning is meant to be used locally.

Interesting, I went through a lot of my fonts and Gil Sans seems to be the only real culprit.

To me it seems as though in general Gil Sans has way too much kerning between space and punctuation. It looks horrible no matter what combination it is.

I don’t see why a threesome should ever cause any more problems than a twosome. If ” T” need kerning and “. ” need kerning then why wouldn’t the three together need kerning. The problem with Gil Sans is that ” .” don’t need kerning (at least not the ridiculous amounts that it currently has).

In general, the whole idea that the punctuation space combination need kerning doesn’t seem right to me.

No, I’m not using Connect. I’m using Join, but sometimes it does a “join” and sometimes it does a “connect” — primarily with odd-shaped lines drawn with the Pencil tool. I’ve got a query in to Adobe about the inconsistent behavior. It’s a weird one! We’ll let you know when or if we ever figure it out.

I did in my discussion of the “. T” triplet. “. ” has the space on the right while ” T” has it on the left. Put the three together and the space is severely crimped and disappears altogether in some fonts — Gill Sans being the most famous example.

Dave

Could you explain what you mean “having space characters on both sides of kern pairs in their fonts”?

Could you give me an example of what you are talking about?