[XeTeX] letter spacing

[Jonathan Kew]

On 3 Jun 2006, at 12:39 am, ricardroca at gmail.com wrote:

> Hi,
>
> letterspacing has always been a difficult work for TeX, and with  
> classic TeX
> the right way was to build a new tfm with 'letterspaced' metrics  
> (fontinst
> and other programs did that), because macro packages (like 'soul'  
> for LaTeX)
> were somewhat limited.
>
> As XeTeX doesn't work ('natively') with tfm's, is there a way to  
> play with
> letterspacing directly on the \font command?

Not currently. It's one of several possible \font extensions that has  
been suggested occasionally. Maybe some day.

I'd usually agree with those who consider letterspacing a Bad Thing,  
but I can accept that there are situations where it would be both  
appropriate and useful. AAT fonts can even contain a specific  
"tracking" table, giving the font designer control over how tracking  
adjustments are done, but XeTeX does not currently support this.

JK