[pdftex] Han The Thanh's thesis on microtypography

[Guy Worthington]

Hans Hagen wrote:
> 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.
> 
Hans, sorry for tailing on to your previous message.  My mail reader
is a having a fit of pique.  I tried your suggestion of displaying the
font metrics of a `hyphen' and the dimension of an `em', using the
following code:

%--------------------------------------------------
\noindent Collecting font metrics for \fontname\font

\setbox0=\hbox{-} 
character hyphen (-) has width \the\wd0

\dimen0=1em
dimension em has width \the\dimen0

\bigskip

\font\palatinofont = pplr at 10pt
\palatinofont

\noindent Collecting font metrics for \fontname\font

\setbox0=\hbox{-}
character hyphen (-) has width \the\wd0

\dimen0=1em
dimension em has width \the\dimen0

\bye
%--------------------------------------------------

The result (after filtering through GSview's text extract tool) is 
shown below:

Collecting font metrics for cmr10 
character hyphen (­) has width 3.33333pt 
dimension em has width 10.00002pt 
Collecting font metrics for pplr 
character hyphen (­) has width 3.33pt 
dimension em has width 10.0pt 

Would this be the first group? the group of invariant metrics.

After gathering all the invariant metrics, I guess I then search for
metrics, that when compared, have a small variation,  and so on, until
I've graded the two fonts.  Apart from the 40 characters that Thanh
defines, are there any other principal metrics, that I should be
searching for?

I'll play with this for a while, and see if I can get results similar
to your own examples.