In reply to Italics & Punctuation:
I’ve built several OpenType math fonts and know about italic correction in MATH table, but its use there is just an abuse (it is (ab)used for positioning sub/superscripts, a left over from TeX which did so to maintain a compact font format in the olden days of tight computing resources). Italic correction in TeX (outside math) is certainly applied between fonts, it is simply an amount of kern that can be applied whenever requested to compensate for negative side bearings of italic glyphs, so in TeX with ({\it italic f\/}) you get f's italic correction applied, as compared to ({\it italic f}):
Clik here to view.
(this is “plain” TeX syntax, higher level formats like LaTeX automate applying italic correction when switching between italic and non-italic fonts.)
