Thank you for answering my question. I spent time on a fonts list, and they talked about kerning all the time, but I thought it had to do with the design of the individual characters, the extra feet, I think there is a word for that, too. Guess it's serifs and sans serifs.
So essentially, kerning is about aesthetics and fitting some letters together more closely than others to please the eye. I'll think of it that way.
I'm interested in fonts for their artistic merit; everyone's tastes are different, but knowledgeable people would id fonts for me (and others), and I'd see if I could find a free version. That was for my pc, and now I don't bother collecting them so far with the Mac. I can't think of the name of an all caps font I liked to use, Typographer's something. Then I found a really nice calligraphy font I used a lot.
I picked up a book about design and making them but haven't tried to make any of my own, can't do everything. I still get a newsletter from the Scriptorium where there are lots of fonts designed from old type faces but haven't bought any for a long time.
You may not be an expert, but you're far more knowledgeable than I.
I spent a lot of time poking around the Scriptorium looking for inspiration. They do very good work, and have some amazing old source documents they use as patterns to make fonts from.
If you are interested in making fonts, I suggest you take a look at this site http://www.high-logic.com/. A program called Font Creator is available there. I bought it years ago and used it lots. As I remember, it was a pretty economical program.
Another site to look to for inspiration and free fonts is http://www.aimwell.org/index.html. This fellow is a Buddhist monk who makes fonts and provides them free to folks like us. Not for commercial use.
God bless!