[XeTeX] Custom kerning

Andrew Moschou andmos at gmail.com
Tue Oct 6 15:49:15 CEST 2009


I think we can do this already, using \XeTeXinterchartoks (see
XeTeX-reference.pdf) - just set it up so that whenever the string "ra"
appears, the appropriate kern is inserted automatically, etc. I don't know
if it is possible to get this working for italic text only, unless you
redefine \itshape, but I wouldn't recommend that unless you know exactly
what you are doing (or someone else can do it for you).

Andrew


2009/10/7 John Was <john.was at ntlworld.com>

>  Hello
>
> I expect it's too late for the official 2009 TeXLive, but I thought I'd
> reiterate my request for some facility to tweak the kerning pairs in any
> given font by an external command - at font loading this would be something
> like 'kering=mykerns', analogous to 'mapping=tex-text', the 'mykerns' file
> being something that users could compile for themselves according to a
> specified syntax.
>
> The issue has come up again recently when I moved over to the Open Type
> version of Monotype's Imprint font (Imprint Pro) for continuity of
> appearance in a periodical as I changed over from an old EmTeX system to
> XeTeX:  disappointingly, the italic font continues to give bad spacing
> between lower-case 'r' and some following letters, most noticeably 'a',
> which is a nuisance as there is often citation of books with words like
> 'morality', 'fragility' in the title.  The flaw always did exist in the font
> since digitization, but it seems that the manufacturer hasn't made any
> improvements to the kerning.  Until they do (it could be a long wait), it
> would be most convenient just to specify some space between 'r' and 'a'
> (etc.), to avoid workarounds such as 'r\kern 1sp a', which of course breaks
> the hyphenation algorithm as well as cluttering up the file.
>
> I seem to recall that when it was discussed before, others said it would be
> useful, so I'm just trying to make sure it eventually moves from 'pending'
> to 'active' rather than 'ditched'...
>
> Best
>
>
> John
>
>
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