[Fontinst] letterspacing

[Lars Hellström]

At 12.55 +0200 2005-05-26, Philipp Lehman wrote:
>Am Mittwoch, 25. Mai 2005 20:17 schrieb Lars Hellström:
>
>> Hmmm...  A couple of days ago I changed in the forthcoming release
>> the defaults for capspacing and smallcapsspacing to be the value of
>> letterspacing (if that is set, otherwise 0 as now). This means that
>> in order to have it as you wish one would only have to change the
>> default for \uclig if ligaturing=0, which does not seem
>> unreasonable.
>
>There's one more problem with SSsmall. Suppose I'm building a titling
>font, caps & small caps only, all conveniently spaced out. I have
>expert fonts with native small caps. The ETX file is t1c.etx, which
>defines \uclig#1#2{#1spaced}. With the default setup, I still need
>two fixes:
>
>\resetglyph{SSspaced}
>  \glyph{S}{1000}
>  \movert{\int{letterspacing}}
>  \glyph{S}{1000}
>\endsetglyph

A slightly refined version of that is already in place in lubuild.mtx. Did
you perhaps rather mean

  \resetglyph{SS}
     \glyph{SSspaced}{1000}
  \endresetglyph

?

>\resetglyph{SSsmall}
>  \glyph{Ssmall}{1000}
>  \movert{\int{letterspacing}}
>  \glyph{Ssmall}{1000}
>\endsetglyph

That glyph too is already being spaced, in lsmisc.mtx.

>Now you mentioned that there is a problem with legacy code being left
>over in lsfake.mtx. If I comment that out, defining \uclig and
>setting ligaturing=0 is sufficient as far as SSspaced is concerned,
>but I still have to break up SSsmall explicitly.

That's probably because smallcapsspacing defaults to 0, then. This has been
changed.

>Redefining \lclig
>does not have the desired effect because "germandbls" is controlled
>by \lc. I obviously can't define \lc#1#2{#1spaced} since I need
>{#1small} for all glyphs except for "germandbls" which should become
>Ssmall+Ssmall with letterspacing.

That's how lsmisc.mtx sets it!

>> >I suppose this applies to IJ/ij as well,
>>
>> Yes, but whether that is a good thing is harder to say. Alan's
>> comments in t1.etx say that these should ideally be one character
>> wide in a monowidth font.
>>
>> >but I'm not sure about º/‡ and /Ê.
>>
>> I'm afraid that got badly garbled.
>
>That's \AE, \ae, \OE, and \oe

No, those shouldn't be spaced. They're never even faked as two letters, so
how could one space them? (Most authorities are very clear that one
shouldn't ever fake these letters.)

>(and also \IJ and \ij). Note that the
>above is really a question, I don't know. It might very well be the
>case that a ligature (say, IJ) is one character wide in a monowidth
>font but should still be treated as two characters if letterspacing
>is applied. It might be helpful to get comments from native speakers
>of the affected languages.

Yes, but unfortunately one very rarely gets such comments. :-(

Lars Hellström