[pdftex] Character protrusion / manual / man page

Hans Hagen pragma at wxs.nl
Mon Dec 17 10:00:08 CET 2001


At 12:22 AM 12/15/2001 +0100, Gerolf wrote:


>I just started to play with pdfTeX's nice new "micro-typesetting" feature 
>called "character protrusion", which allows small characters to be shifted 
>into the margin, such that the border doesn't look ragged. I wouldn't 
>expect Microsoft Word ever being capable to do this... Surely protrusion 
>is most useful for the hyphen character, which appears rather frequently 
>in German texts.
>
>As described on pages 111 to 114 in the appendix to Han The Thanh's thesis 
>(which can be found at www.pragma-pod.nl ), hyphen protrusion is set up by 
>saying
>
>    \font \myfont = X at  Ypt
>    \pdfprotrudechars = 2 % consider protrusion for line-breaking
>    \rpcode \myfont `\- = 700
>
>Thanh is doing this for a serif font, I suppose. However, if I'm using the 
>Acrobat Reader built-in font "Helvetica", I must say
>
>    \rpcode \myfont `\- = 300
>
>to get even borders. So \rpcode is font-specific as well as 
>character-specific. Now for my question: Can I deduce \rpcode from the 
>character width, or is there a general rule to compute \rpcode from 
>\fontdimen parameters? -

You can best look into the example file that comes with pdftex since that 
reflects the latest methods. Keep in mind that protruding is part of 
thanh's experiments and that in a coming cleanup of code things may change 
(actually that did change from % of char width into % of em).

Hans
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