[pdftex] Spacing between letters ---plain pdftex

[Robin Fairbairns]

Reinhard Kotucha <reinhard.kotucha at web.de> wrote:

> John R. Culleton writes:
> 
>  > > > Whatever would we do without him?
> 
> I suppose that without the existence of pdftex we would do obvious
> things, like swimming in the lake in summer instead of sitting in
> front of a computer...

ah you young things...

>  > BTW Han's  \letterspacing primitive is not in the Pdftex Manual, at 
>  > least not in my 2005 version. All the added primitives described 
>  > therein have the \pdf prefix. 
> 
> Yes, Thanh worked recently on letterspacing, I don't expect that the
> 2005 manual is up-to-date.
> 
>  > WRT LaTeX I have used soul.sty
> 
> I'm not sure whether it's possible to provide letterspacing on macro
> level at all.  Try this:
> 
> AV\par
> A\kern0pt V\par
> \bye

of course.  there are irregular whinges on c.t.t about soul not working
for this or that thing -- almost always boils down to something silly,
like putting another command in the argument to the soul command.

> It seems that if you add \kern, you loose the kerning info provided by
> the font.  Hence, I think that Thanh's primitive solves this problem.

ah -- you're being subtle.  does soul try to deal with that? -- i didn't
think so, and i know letterspac(e|ing) doesn't.

robin