[texhax] Tex Queries (3): Cases for italic correction

[Joel C. Salomon]

On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 7:59 PM, Paul Stanley
<paulrichardstanley at gmail.com> wrote:
>> regarding the lack of an italic correction
>> on the d, paul stanley asks,
>>
>>     Am I correct in thinking that there's very little italic correction
>>     possible for the d? If my memory serves me well, the right-most point
>>     on the baseline is very close to the actual right-most point of the glyph
>>     (the real width?)
>>
>> no, actually quite a bit of correction could
>> be made for the italic d.  although the d is
>> a bit less tall than the ell, the slope is
>> the same, and the top serifs have similar
>> shape so they don't have any effect.
>>
>> so "dx" has quite a different appearance than
>> "lx", although if both d and l are variables,
>> one would expect about the same space between
>> them and the x.  and it's not there with d.
>
> is this --- and other similar apparent inconsistenceis --- part of the basic
> makeup of TeX (i.e. the primitives), or are they part of a more high-level
> TeX format specification (e.g. plain TeX) and can therefore be changed at
> that level if required?

This is purely a "feature" of the CM math fonts. Use a different font
if you don't like it.

---Joel