[pdftex] Han The Thanh's thesis on microtypography

[Ben Crowell]

Would anyone like to give some guidance to one
uneducated in typography about how to choose margin
kerning parameters? I tried activating margin kerning for
my book, which is typeset using LaTeX's default serif font
(computer modern?) at 11 pt. To my untrained eye, the margin
kerning correction seemed too big -- the result looked /less/
optically straight. This surprised me, since the samples in
Han The Thanh's thesis looked much better to me with
margin kerning than without. I then edited protcode.tex,
reducing by a factor of 2 every value that was >100. The
result seemed better to me. I could provide PDF examples if
it would be helpful, but there's nothing unusual about what I'm
doing --- the text is 113 mm wide, on letter-size paper. I'm
using teTeX on MacOS X. This is the current version of teTeX; I
just downloaded it last night. (I recall reading somewhere that
for a while teTeX had some kind of bug in margin kerning...?)

Is this just a case where the novice's perceptions are different
from the conoisseur's? The first time I saw antialiased
fonts, I thought they looked horrible; now they look normal to me,
and unaliased fonts look bad. Or are the default parameters
in protcode.tex only appropriate for very large type sizes, like
the ones in the samples in the thesis?