Setting up good kerning is one of the most important parts of designing a typeface. Cheap or free fonts often have bad or non existent kerning and it gets incredibly tedious having to manually kern texts.
There are some obvious common kerning pairs like KO, AV, LT, TA.
An illustration of some common kerning pairs with and without kerning:
Kerning by eye can be a long and laborious process and my process at the moment is very haphazard—so what I'm looking for is some common kerning pairs and general strings to work with when kerning.
Obviously every typeface will be different but something to use as a starting point would be incredibly useful.