[XeTeX] Custom kerning

John Was john.was at ntlworld.com
Tue Oct 6 17:23:40 CEST 2009


Hello Florian

Your list of desiderata pretty well coincides with mine, and the problem of 
roman parentheses round an italic word  comes up frequently (particularly 
acute with e.g. (_f_) I find).  In British (as opposed to continental) 
typography, one could simply use a font editor to replace all occurrences of 
italic ( ) [ ] < > { } in a font with their roman counterparts, since the 
italic versions were virtually unused in normal academic book work (while I 
was at it, I used to make sure the kerning was satisfactory, of course - and 
for good measure I would always replace the broad acute-angled < > with 
their tall obtuse-angled equivalents (of more use to me in textual work), 
moving the acute-angled ones to other slots in case I needed them).

One might make the ( ) active so that the roman versions were called 
whenever they occurred, but parentheses are often used as delimeters in the 
arguments of common macro packages so things could get extremely messy!

Best


John




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Florian Grammel" <grammel at gmx.net>
To: "Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms" <xetex at tug.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 06, 2009 3:13 PM
Subject: Re: [XeTeX] Custom kerning


>A friend of mine does this by automatically running an script on his 
>tex-file before each xetex-run. But it would certainly be very handy,  if 
>xetex could do this on its own!
>
> I'd especially like to define kerns for any specific font and specific 
> style, and (just dreaming here) I'd love to be able to define kerning  in 
> between different styles, like the extra kern between a regular  bracket 
> and its italic content... afaik this is impossible with  standard 
> kerning-tables even if I'm willing and allowed to edit the  font itself in 
> a font-editor.
>
>> I expect it's too late for the official 2009 TeXLive, but I thought  I'd 
>> reiterate my request for some facility to tweak the kerning  pairs in any 
>> given font by an external command - at font loading  this would be 
>> something like 'kering=mykerns', analogous to  'mapping=tex-text',
>
> Speaking of which... I haven't tried it yet, but wouldn't this be 
> something one could define in a tec file?
>
> Best regards
> Florian.
>
>
>
>
> ____________________________________________
>
> Florian Grammel
>
> Gentofte, Denmark
>
>
>
> 



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