[XeTeX] letter spacing

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 3 juin 06 à 16:35, Arthur Reutenauer a écrit :

>> I'm glad it is difficult or even impossible :-) I think letterspacing
>> looks awful - why would one want to have it?
>
>   Where does it come from, anyway? I know it is still used very  
> much in
> german typography and I've seen it in russian too. It really looks  
> like a
> hack to me, for situations where a bold face isn't available :-)

The only place where I've seen this (and with lowercase) is in books  
from the now defunct "Éditions Mir", established in Paris and  
publishing French translations of Russian scientific books. For  
example in Landau's & Lifshitz's Theoretical Physics course, where it  
was used as an alternative to italics and boldface for some titles  
and for emphasis. Very odd looking, but not too bad given it was used  
sparingly. I've never seen it used elsewhere.

The tracking style <http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/ 
contrib/tracking/> (for LaTeX, but also plain TeX) allows to vary the  
interletter space, by extending a trick from one of the exercises in  
the TeXbook. From its comments:

> %       Available commands:
> %
> %
> %	\track{x}{abc}
> %	    abc - initial chain of symbols
> %           x   - additional space which is added to the right of each
> %                 symbol but the last (including "spaces"). May be  
> positive,
> %                 negative and zero.
> %                   Ex.  \track{-.3pt}{This is a probe}
> %
> %
> %	\fittrack{x}{abc}
> %           abc - initial chain of symbols
> %           x   - final length for the result of this command. May  
> be less
> %                 or greater thah the length of the initial chain.
> %                    Ex. \fittrack{8cm}{This is a probe}
> %
> %
> %	\ratiotrack{x}{abc}
> %           abc - initial chain of symbols
> %           x   - ratio, showing how many times the result of this  
> command
> %                 is longer than the length of the initial chain.  
> May be
> %                 less, greater or equal to 1.
> %                    Ex. \ratiotrack{1.2}{This is a probe}

I can't remember exactly why, but I had used once a derivative of  
thesé commands (in a custom letterhead macro file). The derivative  
was defined as:

> % Tricky macro for increasing interletter spacing
>
> \def\dolist{\afterassignment\dodolist\let\next= }
> \def\dodolist{\ifx\next\endlist \let\next\relax
>   \else \\\let\next\dolist \fi
>   \next}
> \def\endlist{\endlist}
> \def\track#1\by#2{\def\\{\next\kern#2}%
>   \leavevmode \hbox{\expandafter\dolist#1\endlist}}

and used as:

> \track \sendingname \by{.2em}

with \sendingname being "Bruno Voisin", for example, and yielding:

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Hope this helps,

Bruno Voisin