That's normal. That's how it looks when it's set to metrics. When you set custom values, they appear without the parenthesis.

But this is odd, no kerning visible between the pair of glyphs in InDesign...

BTW, in Illustrator the same kern pair looks just fine.

Is this a r-t-l font?

yep

r-t-l kerning is a little tricky. You can't just adjust the kern values like you would in l-t-r languages. You need to adjust both the position and kerning values (and IIRC it does not really display correctly in VOLT). I don't remember the details and I don't have VOLT with me to check and remind myself how it was done.

Actually, it seems like an ID CS5 bug. It works perfect in CS4, CS3. ID gets it all wrong when it needs to display RTL kerned glyphs, while Illustrator does it just fine.

A bug report is cooking. Thanks anyway.

How are you doing the kerning? I have r-t-l fonts which are properly kerned in CS5...

With kern table

Simple kern tables? In Fontlab?

I have never been able to make basic kern tables work for r-t-l fonts in any version of InDesign. The only way I was successful was with VOLT. (I suppose it can be done now with AFDKO, but I haven't done any OT work in a while.)

You need more advanced GPOS tables than what Fontlab produces (but like I mentioned before I don't remember the details). The GPOS table used four values rather than a single kern value...