[lltx] luamicrotype?

[Will Robertson]

On 22/02/2010, at 10:33 PM, Élie Roux wrote:

> The main question is to know the user interface for microtypography:
> users are obviously used to microtype doing everything on its own, and
> I think such a thing is overall a good idea; but I'm not sure we
> should keep microtype for OTF fonts as it will need a lot of changes
> to interact with fontspec, and the checks to know if we are in an
> "old" configuration (with 8-bit fonts) or in a modern configuration
> (with Unicode fonts) will be a mess...


My current feelings (which may change; this is just random collections of thoughts at this stage):

1. font expansion and/or protrusion should be globally switchable, which lends itself more to a package like microtype than for specific font loading in fontspec

2. if people go to the effort of creating and distributing protrusion settings for different fonts, then they should be loaded by default -- although whether protrusion should be active or not should be entirely up to the user

3. these two points above lead me to think that specific expansion/protrusion settings should be somewhat "invisible" to most fontspec users; is this similar to what happens in ConTeXt?

4. however, if the relevant parts of microtype and fontspec are amenable to being merged together, I'm certainly not opposed to a hybrid package; the less packages to be loaded the better, IMO. But I don't want to step on microtype's toes if separating the packages is better for maintenance and development.

Need to get back to work; Robert, would you like to join this mailing list to continue the discussion?

-- Will