[lltx] luamicrotype?

[Élie Roux]

2010/2/23 Will Robertson <wspr81 at gmail.com>:
>
> 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

Agreed, but as fonts will be loaded with fontspec, luamicrotype (or
whatever) will have to interact with it and fontspec will have to
provide a way to load a font with microtypographic options...

> 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

Agreed! What I imagined more precisely is this:
 - the user loads luamicrotype
 - luamicrotype sets \pdfprotrudechars2 \pdfadjustspacing2 and tells
fontspec to have the default option Protrusion = Auto
 - fontspec loads all new fonts with luaotfload with the option +protrusion=auto
 - luaotfload, when it sees the 'auto' options calls a function (we
can imagine something like callback.create) to retrieve the protrusion
settings for the font, and luamicrotype provides it through this
callback

What do you think about this?

> 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.

I guess so... though It's starting to smell like LaTeX 2.5 (the idea
of which I totally agree with) ;-)

Thank you,
-- 
Elie