[luatex] LuaTeX file almost 2.5x bigger

[Robert]

On 31.07.10 12:14, Hans Hagen wrote:
> Also, expansion happens on a per-line base.

If that were the case then expansion would indeed be rather useless. 
Fortunately, it is not true. Expansion takes place during 
paragraph-breaking, where even a minimal (that is, (almost) invisible) 
expansion amount may reduce the badness, the number of hyphenations, and 
overfull boxes quite substantially.

> - Protrusion was seen as a bug.

Then it was probably overdone (eg., hyphens protruding by their full width).

> - No differences were see in many cases (we used 600 dpi high quality
> prints).
>
> - Extremes like stretched wide o's in one line and shrunken ones in the
> following ones went unnoticed (so much for claims to see details).
>
> When Thanh and I discussed that (at a Dante meeting) with Hermann Zapf
> he made the remark that probably 99% of the readers would not notice the
> difference. He also suggested that stretching lines vertically in order
> to get rid of widow lines was probably more effective. (I must have the
> tests done afterward somewhere.)
>
> What was striking is that the fact that one uses an advanced engine like
> tex does not mean that the user is capable of seeing the difference. If
> someone shows me two versions of a document probably I cannot say with
> 100% certainty which one has used hz.

Which is what microtypography is all about: improving the visual 
appearance *without being noticeable*.

Regards,
-- 
  Robert