Automating PANOSE data

Putting accurate PANOSE classification data in a font involves doing a lot of detailed measurement of individual glyphs and then calculations based on those measurements. This is news to a lot of font developers, who either guess at PANOSE classifications based on the descriptive names used in the system, copy PANOSE data from a similar font (which might also be inaccurate), or simply don't bother to attempt PANOSE at all, setting most values to 'Any'.

PANOSE is, as a result, a technology that is unreliable for the thing that it was designed to do: font matching and substitution. Leaving aside, for now, a number of issues — the significance of font matching in various circumstances, the failure of PANOSE to accommodate non-Latin fonts, etc. — I'd like to consider whether it might be possible to automate the process of defining accurate PANOSE information for a font.

Before jumping into this discussion, I strongly encourage people to read the PANOSE Classification Guide (currently maintained by Monotype). It's important to understand how PANOSE is designed and how the measurements and calculations apply (although this is not to say that the only way to approach automation would be to directly script performance of those measurements and calculations).