[pdftex] Spacing between letters ---plain pdftex

[jonathan d p ferguson]

hi.

I'm not sure what you want to do... so here's a bunch of info you  
might pick and choose from.

On Jun 28, 2007, at 7:32 AM, John R. Culleton wrote:
> Is there a macro anywhere to create faux smallcaps? Basically such a
> macro would mix two different sizes of the same font.  I use pdftex
> and Context.

Caveat Emptor: the glyphs in Small Caps are truly different from  
regular capitals... For font-style guidance, I refer to my copy of  
The Elements of Typographic Style. I also recommend http:// 
www.typophile.com/ for font related (not TeX) help. For TeX related  
font help, see http://www.tug.org/fonts/ most of the rest of my  
observations are already documented at the tug pages.

Resources aside, I assume that you have already chosen a font, but do  
not have a small caps face for that font? I would look for a font  
that includes the faces you need, as per your question of 2 days  
ago... Presumably, you can create the face with metafont, but you'll  
need to convert the metafont font to Type1 or TrueType using mftrace  
(http://lilypond.org/mftrace/). I presume you would then Install the  
font with fontinst. YMMV, of course.

On Jun 26, 2007, at 5:04 PM, John R. Culleton wrote:
> While I am on the subject, do you know of any free Western European
> SmallCap font that ships with the current texlive or Miktex?

Latin Modern has a nice set of Small Caps glyphs. Computer Modern  
comes to mind (my texlive 2007 has CM-concrete as a Type1, and  
metafont font sources, designed for vnTeX), but I don't know what you  
mean by "Western European" ---encoding? ---glyphs? Of course,  
distributing fonts has its own set of legal issues to worry about.  
Some specially licensed OpenType fonts you might not be using, but  
come with texlive:

antt
iwona
lm
tex-gyre

Happily, there are a great many other free font options in TeX  
distributions. As an aside, I observe that Latin Modern lacks a true  
Italic face, offering only an Oblique face (of course, this maps to  
"italic" most of the time, but it isn't really italic, it's oblique,  
or in the parlance of DEK: slanted).

If you use XeTeX (best on Mac OS X), any font you have in your usual  
system (and opentype TeX in certain situations) location will be  
available to you. If you use (La)TeX, there are quite a few nice  
fonts available too, and packages for their support. For ConTeXt +  
XeTeX, see:
http://www.ntg.nl/pipermail/ntg-context/2007/024683.html.

well, i hope that helps a little...

have a day.yad
jdpf