[XeTeX] Font protrusion --- new or old ?

[Florian Grammel]

> Is this microtypography stuff a new fad? Is it really a shortcomming  
> of XeTeX not to support it?

No -- quite the contrary: Take a page from the Gutenberg-Bible for  
instance

http://www.gutenbergdigital.de/gudi/eframes/index.htm

and you'll see that both levels of microtypography are used.

The luxury of the rest of the book also gives you a hint, why it is  
difficult to find examples of microtypography just by browsing random  
archives. To typeset a book this way is very costly, since the  
compositor will need much more time than for a book with straight  
edges. Thus you'll only find microtypograhy on a very low percentage  
of very high-quality books.

To succeed Gutenberg had to show the world that lead-type could do  
everything the scribes could (incl. optical margins) and the question  
of the price was secondary, as manuscripts were much more expensive  
than print anyway. But he only used it in the prestigious bible, not  
e.g. in a schoolbook like his Donatus http://www.gutenberg-museum.de/bildchen.php?bildnamenun=uploads/Donat.jpg



Personally I would love to see XeTeX at least do character-protrusion.  
But as Jonathan Kew has pointed out earlier: According to XeTeX's  
basic idea this should be done using an OpenType-feature

http://www.microsoft.com/OpenType/otspec/features_ko.htm#opbd

Unfortunately I haven't been able to find any further description of  
how to implement it (e.g.. precise OT syntax) or just evidence of that  
it actually has been used at all in any font.
I'd be very grateful, if anybody here had further information on this...


Best regards,
Florian.




____________________________________________

Florian Grammel

Gentofte, Denmark