> Why do you think these fonts have kern tables at all?
> I looked at Optima.ttc with Fontforge and can’t find one.

On my system, they do have kerning values.

FontForge > Elemente > Schriftinformationen > Nachschlagetabellen > GPOS > kern

As I wrote, I can generate new TTF fonts with FontForge from Optima.ttc for example, use them instead and ConTeXt then has access to the kerning table (see attached PDF). I was just wondering if there is a way to use the TTC files directly with ConTeXt.