[pdftex] Han The Thanh's thesis on microtypography

[Hans Hagen]

At 10:58 AM 2/1/2002 +0800, Guy Worthington wrote:

>Hell will freeze over before you'll stop me reading the details hidden
>behind `dangerous bend' signs; and not in a month of sundays will
>requesting a certain competency stop me from misusing advanced
>typographic techniques.  I'm only kept in check by comparing my
>results with manuscripts of higher quality (one of my favorites being
>the beginners manual for ConTeXt).

-) One thing that you can try do do with the palatino is the following.

\setbox0=\hbox{-} \showthe\wd0

\dimen0=1em       \showthe\dimen0

do this for both cmr and palatino.

this gives you an idea of where the differences are.

There has been a shift in pdftex from specifying the protrusion relative to 
the width of a glyph to a percentage of 1em; the old method was more 
portable among fonts, while the later is more related to the design.

one thing you can do is to change the prot values relative to the fraction 
of 1em-cmr and 1em-palatino

[actually, this is how i support hanging in context: there are different 
vectors for subranges of chars, and they can be tight to font shapes, one 
can also relatively scale them; one aspect (less important for english) is 
that one should also take care of accented chars (not in thanh's vectors), 
which in context is handled by the names glyph mechanism]

>One last observation, before I go off to lick my wounds.  I've written
>a tip in my tips notebook, not to use patatino for long slabs of text
>(and from my rather fallible memory, I think I can attribute the tip
>to Theirry).  Hans suggests marginal kerning works best when used with
>long slabs of text.  Using a poltician's syllogism, can I come to
>conclusion that marginal kerning using patatino as a body font is a
>pathalogical case?

actually i like palatino (esp when combined with palatino math) (if you 
want to see an example: go to www.pragma-pod.com/showcase.pdf -> manuals -> 
metafun manuals (screen/paper) or take a look at the fonts manual (i admit 
that that one is not an easy one).

i'll send you a file showing palatino with only hanging punct; this looks 
quite ok; keep in mind that thanh's vectors also let characters protrude 
and esp non punct shapes are very different per font.

Hans

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