You mean negative kerning (tweaking them apart)? That is almost certain to create horrible glyph spacing for many fonts.
In the hierarchy of typographical sins, collisions between letters and accent marks are usually worse than the spacing problems introduced to avoid such collisions. The exception may be in typefaces with a very wide f with a long overhang, in which case a variant f would come in handy. The most elegant solution is to a) decompose all diacritics and dynamically position marks, b) contextually substitute a narrower f before diacritic letters as appropriate, c) contextually shift the accent mark slightly as appropriate to finesse the positioning. Ligatures are really a very inefficient way of dealing with such situations.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
It is necessary that by all means and cunning, the cursed owners of books should be persuaded to make them available to us, either by argument or by force. - Michael Apostolis, 1467
