[pdftex] Spacing between letters ---plain pdftex

[Robin Fairbairns]

John R. Culleton <john at wexfordpress.com> wrote:

> On Tuesday 26 June 2007 11:37, John R. Culleton wrote:
> > There is a LaTeX sty that with some clumsiness will set a string of
> > letters to a particular degree of "tracking" positive or negative.
> > What I am wondering is if there is a primitive or plain tex value
> > that I can modify for a given string to put letterspacing between
> > glyphs such as is often used in a running head for fiction, often
> > with smallcaps.  I am thinking of something like
> > \headline={\sc\foo 1.5 Here is My title}
> >
> > where \sc is a smallcap font and \foo is the parameter I need to
> > reset to get more interglyph spacing.
> 
> Thanh Han The answered offlist with an exact solution involving the 
> pdftex primitive \letterspacing as described here: 
> http://www.sendspace.com/file/0y11fy
> 
> Whatever would we do without him?

read the manual?  you obviously knew there's a pdftex primitive, or you
wouldn't have asked here...

(mind you, without him, there would be no manual...)

(incidentally, the jibe at latex was amusing, given that the first
instance of letterspacing macros that i encountered was written for
plain tex use by one of the world's most eager plain tex worshippers.
actually, i think soul is rather neater...)

robin