[XeTeX] XeTeX 0.994 for Mac OS X

[Jonathan Kew]

On 7 Jun 2006, at 1:29 am, Ricard Roca wrote:

> I have tested current SVN XeTeX (0.994 for Mac OS X) with Linux,  
> and it
> compiles well.

Good... I plan to update the SuSE and Ubuntu packages soon, but  
anyone who's happy to compile their own (or uses a different  
distribution) is of course welcome to go ahead at any time.

> The 'letterspace' feature works very well. I think on-the-fly
> letterspacing was long time awaited in the TeX world (it was a pain  
> to make
> tfm's for different sizes and small caps or caps). Thanks!

You're welcome!

> One question: when you write 'letterspace=3.0', does it mean a  
> letterspace
> 3/100 wider?

Yes.... it means that 3% of the font's "at size" (point size) will be  
added between characters (except before diacritics, if you're using  
Unicode combining marks such as U+0301, etc).

Note that you don't get extra spacing at the beginning and end of a  
text run, so the example I gave maintains a straight left margin ....  
and if you try it with \rightline for each line, you still get a  
straight right margin, too. So it's not a simple adjustment to the  
advance of *every* character; it really is inter-character spacing  
that you're getting, not increased character width.

The downside of this is that you don't get letterspacing at internal  
boundaries within the line, either; it *only* occurs within runs of  
the font for which it's set. So if you try:

   \font\X="Hoefler Text:Letter Case=All Capitals;letterspace=10.0"  
at 10pt
   \font\Y="Hoefler Text Black:Letter Case=All  
Capitals;letterspace=10.0" at 10pt

   \X Here's some em{\Y bold}ened text

you may not like the result; xetex doesn't letterspace between <mb>  
or <de> here (just like it wouldn't consider kerning or ligating at  
such a boundary).

JK