[pdftex] Problems with microtypographic extensions (and specific older pdfTeX versions?)

[RS]

On 16.08.2005 19:39, Frank Küster wrote:
> Hi pdfTeX people,
> 
> in our Debian BTS we have a problem report about \pdfadjustspacing and
> \pdfprotrudechars.  In the previous Debian stable release with an
> ancient pdfTeX, the user simply put 
> 
> \pdfadjustspacing=2
> \pdfprotrudechars=2 
> 
> in his preamble and observed positive effects.  

This must have been a placebo effect. AFAIK, it has always been
necessary to set up the fonts, too (\lpcode, \rpcode, resp.
\pdffontexpand). In addition to that, \pdfadjustspacing did only work if
the expanded fonts were available as tfm files.

> Now with the release of
> Debian sarge, we have a still ancient, but newer version of teTeX
> (2.0.2) with pdfTeX (Web2C 7.4.5) 3.14159-1.10b, and he reports that
> this stopped working.  A current pdfcprot.sty from CTAN seems to work
> with this pdfTeX version, but it only does character protruding, no
> space changes and thus no altered linebreaks.

pdfcprot provides an interface only to character protrusion, so this
goes without saying.

> microtype.sty is supposed to do both, but with teTeX-2.0.2 the user gets
> an error when the expanded font is created:
> 
> kpathsea: Illegal fontname `aer12+20': contains '+'

pdftex 1.10b does not feature *automatic* font expansion, which was
introduced with 1.20 (this is why microtype.sty enables font expansion
by default only for this or newer versions). Therefore, pdftex is trying
to find the tfm files for the expanded font instances. There is no
chance of getting font expansion to work without instances of these tfm
files being available to pdftex (either pre-created or created via a
modified mktextfm script).

I don't know why it is exactly this error message that is being issued
and not a message about a missing file aer12+20, which I would have
expected, but this does not seem to have much relevance with regard to
the original problem.


Regards,
Robert (the guy who wrote microtype.sty).