[Fontinst] letterspacing

[WillAdams@aol.com]

>> In a message dated 02-12-30 2:26:50 PM, olli@sopos.org writes:
>> > 1. I want to space out the letters of a small font (the one I use for
>> > footnotes) as it's adviced in many typographic books.? AFAIK this is
>not
>> > possibly inside of TeX, and I have to produce a virtual font for this.

and I'd replied:
>> To my mind, it'd be better to do this as an optical-size-oriented option.

to which Olli asked:
>Hi William,
>
>I'm not sure if I understood you.  You mean, I should scale the font
>on the x-axis?  To be honest, I wouldn't like to do so, as I fear that
>this would destroy the optical appearance of the font.  When I just
>space out, it remains the same, just a bit more "generously".

No, no horizontal scaling. (I even had the effrontery to tell Thanh (the 
pdfTeX guy) that doing this was a bad idea for his implementation of the HZ 
algorithm. Just minute letterspacing as you'd mentioned, I was just 
suggesting that you describe it as an optical scaling variation

>> Best of course would be to get / use a font w/ an optical axis.
>
>You mean a Multiple Master font?  Yes, I think that would be the best
>solution.

Or a set of Type 1 fonts which are done in differing optical sizes, e.g., the 
Times family as described in _TeX Unbound_

William