thanks for the feedback

Actually you can adjust yourself the 'xAdvance' offset in the preview mode. adding stroke or shadow is increasing each char bounding box, so the spacing is increasing too. i choose not to modify it automatically and let the user do it himself, depending on his needs (if you need a 20px stroke for example)

The kerning should also work and is written in the atlas file, try to use for example Arial, and letters in the preview mode 'AVATe', you can check/uncheck the kerning option and see the difference.

cocos2d/bmfont: yes you're right, i'll add that for the next update.

for the charsets: clicking 'add' will add the selected charset in the settings. clicking N times will add it N times... maybe it needs a little more work to make it more understandable.