[pdftex] Spacing between letters ---plain pdftex

RS w.m.l at gmx.net
Wed Jun 27 01:49:57 CEST 2007


On 26.06.2007 23:04, John R. Culleton wrote:
> WRT LaTeX I have used soul.sty  in a Context job where the 
> InDesign-influenced designer specified tracking all over the place. 
> There are several parameters to be set for each iteration of soul.sty
>  which gives very fine control but IMO made it clumsy to use in 
> practice. It required special handling in tracked multiline 
> paragraphs.  Han's solution appears to handle that situation better 
> with less fuss and feathers.

Wrt latex you might want to check out the microtype package, which wraps
around the new pdftex primitive. It allows to adjust tracking of sets of
fonts (e.g. all small-caps, or all tiny fonts or whatever), without
having to bother about adding any markup.


On 27.06.2007 00:49, Robin Fairbairns wrote:
> Reinhard Kotucha <reinhard.kotucha-S0/GAf8tV78 at public.gmane.org>
> wrote:
> 
>>> 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.

Yes, soul manages to retain kerning (if it succeeds at all, that is).
The new \letterspacefont primitive OTOH currently does not. This will be
fixed with the next pdftex version (and microtype, following it).


Regards,
-- 
  Robert


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