[pdftex] auto letter spacing

[Hans Hagen]

Thanh Han The wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I am working on a primitive \letterspacefont that generates
> a letter-spaced font from another font like this:
>
> ,--------
> | \font\f=cmr10
> | \letterspacefont\fx=\f 100 % letterspace \f by a factor 100/1000
> | \fx This is a text in letter-spaced cmr10
> `--------
>
> the above example creates \fx as a virtual font, in which
> each charater is taken from \f, and have a kern of
> 50*quad(f)/1000 at each side. All this happens in pdftex
> memory.
>
> However I am not sure the "more right" way to do this is that
> each character c should have a kern of 5*width_of_c/1000 at
> each side, ie the kern inserted around each character is
> proportional to its width, instead of having a fixed global
> value for all characters. This is more closed to the way font
> expansion is done, but is different from what fontinst does
> for letter-spacing.
>
> How do you see it?
>   
Is there a way to prevent the kern before or after a char? Say that we have a section title, in that case one does not want the margin to be spoiled (the first char needs to align then)

Hans  




-----------------------------------------------------------------
                                          Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
              Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
     tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com
                                             | www.pragma-pod.nl
-----------------------------------------------------------------