[OS X TeX] pdftex 1.20a

[Alexandru Scorpan]

> I am afraid, though, that I am not capable of extreme care and so will 
> stay with plain vanilla LaTeX.

That quote from Thanh's thesis is rather old (1998 or so).  The new 
pdftex 1.20a introduces a major simplification, which eliminates the 
need for extreme care.  Quote from the release announcement of 1.20:

	So far the font expansion feature required that the user
	must be able to create expanded tfms (eg cmr10+10.tfm).
	Now font expansion can be used without creating these
	tfms.

Which new feature allows the microtype package to be used simply by 
calling it via \usepackage.

In any case, margin kerning is a very nice feature already available in 
pdftex, and really makes those margins look better than plain vanilla 
TeX, so I'd encourage everybody to use it, for example through pdfcprot 
package (which a more refined implementation than the going with \input 
protcode.tex etc)

Alex

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