I did a round of printing work two years ago which got me to notice (1) very few printed posters where people use serifed display fonts and (2) awful kerning by default with Microsoft and Adobe tools. When I did desktop publishing in the early 90s and early 00s I never noticed that kerning was so bad and wonder if I had bad taste back then or if it really got worse, like we can blame a patent troll for bad kerning -- I look at old books and see the r almost making love to the s next to it and think how much better it can be.
I spent most of the 1990s and early 2000s working for a typesetting company whose work was college textbooks and monographs for academic presses. We applied modified kern tables to every single typeface we acquired. The tables from the font vendors were inadequate in various ways.
Back then, computers didn't really do kerning as well as they do now, and desktop publishing wasn't as common or affordable. Today, publishing tools are so easy to use, and the default kerning is usually good enough that most people won't notice a problem, or if they do, they often don't know it can be fixed.
> When I did desktop publishing in the early 90s and early 00s I never noticed that kerning was so bad and wonder if I had bad taste back then or if it really got worse, like we can blame a patent troll for bad kerning ….
My suspicion is that there's always been bad kerning in most computer-generated text. Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1015/
