Similar glyphs treated differently

[Jeremy]

Is there a reason why KO treats similar glyphs differently

I had the word 'college†' and the dagger at the end was zero kerned – as I would want
But 'college‡' had a -22 kern between the 's' and doubledagger. If anything I would have thought KO would open this pair.

Generally I would fit many sorts to avoid kerning and only add where absolutely necessary.

I also spotted that KO likes to kern all the maths symbols. I see that they're in their own group.

[Tim Ahrens]

The reason why † is not kerned but ‡ is kerned is that by default, † is set to No kerning, as you can see on the palette, whereas the ‡ has Standard kerning. That’s a flaw, of course, and I just corrected it by removing it from the list of No kerning glyphs.

Btw, if you are curious you can see this list of default groups in the KernOnGlyphs.glyphsPlugin, right click, Show Package Contents, Contents/Resources/default_groups.txt. You could even edit that text file but it would be overwritten when you update Kern On. It’s much better if we discuss things here and I fix them on my side. The whole list is a bit preliminary, I’m open to suggestions.
In any case, you can change the Standard kerning or No kerning settingas it suits you.

If you set † and ‡ to Standard kerning it will probably too tight, as you already mentioned. This is why you should probably select Special spacing and give these glyphs their own group, or re-use one of the existing groups if you think they should have the same amount of special spacing as the superiors, for example.

[Tim Ahrens]

I also spotted that KO likes to kern all the maths symbols. I see that they're in their own group.

If you’d rather not have them kerned at all then just switch them to No kerning.