[texhax] Justification through glyph variants

[Philip TAYLOR]

Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

> It's a matter of fact that Thành's microtypographic extensions are a
> vast improvement.
>
> However, there is no way to interpolate between two glyphs of the same
> character.

That is a very strong statement, Reinhard.  Just because software does
not currently exist to accomplish this task does not mean that there is
no way to accomplish it.  Morphing between two images has long been
possible, John Sauter shewed how to interpolate between two design
sizes in MetaFont, and Adobe's "multiple masters fonts" were intended
to allow exactly the sort of interpolation we are discussing.  Let
us not rule out this solution just because it does not feature in
current mainstream software.

> Another problem is that pdfTeX doesn't support Unicode.
> Hence, even if a font provides "wide letters", an enormous amount of
> work is required to make them accessible.

Is it not the case that some, if not all, of Thành's microtypographic
work has now found its way into XeTeX (either production or beta) ?
  
> I absolutely agree with Arno.  I'm convinced that if there is a
> reasonable solution at all, it's definitely LuaTeX.

LuaTeX is certainly one approach; I am unconvinced that it is
necessarily the only one.

Philip Taylor