[XeTeX] experimental new xetex version - with margin-kerning support

[John Was]

Excellent - does this mean that custom kerning from within XeTeX is moving 
up the 'to-do' list....?  It seems to me to be in the same general area 
(aesthetically though perhaps not technically):  one wants to fine-tune the 
spacing behaviour of specific characters from within the program rather than 
by editing the font (which may not be legal).

John



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jonathan Kew" <jonathan at jfkew.plus.com>
To: "Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms" <xetex at tug.org>
Sent: Monday, May 03, 2010 12:12 AM
Subject: [XeTeX] experimental new xetex version - with margin-kerning 
support


> For those who like to live on the cutting (bleeding?) edge, there is a new 
> version of xetex available in the source repository. Version 0.9996.0 is 
> now available from the svn repository at:
>
>   http://scripts.sil.org/svn-public/xetex/BRANCHES/microtype
>
> This version supports "character protrusion", also known as margin 
> kerning. The character protrusion feature is enabled by setting the 
> parameter \XeTeXprotrudechars, equivalent to pdftex's \pdfprotrudechars.
>
> The protrusion values are set using \lpcode and \rpcode. For TFM fonts, 
> these work in the same way as the pdftex versions; for non-TFM (i.e. 
> native TrueType/OpenType) fonts, they accept either a Unicode character 
> code (prefixed by the keyword "unicode"), a glyph name (prefixed by 
> "name"), or a glyph number. Thus, in the example:
>
>    \font\x = "Charis SIL" at 10pt
>
>    \rpcode \x unicode "2C = 100
>    \rpcode \x name "comma" = 100
>    \rpcode \x 15 = 100
>
> the three \rpcode lines all have the exact same effect, as the comma glyph 
> in this font has glyph ID 15.
>
> In most cases, setting character protrusion values via Unicode codepoints 
> will be the simplest and most robust approach; glyph names and glyph IDs 
> are provided for cases such as contextual forms that are not directly 
> accessible via Unicode character codes.
>
> Note that LaTeX packages such as pdfcprot and microtype will not 
> automatically work with this feature, but it should be possible to update 
> them to recognize the new xetex version and handle it appropriately 
> without too much difficulty.
>
> Many thanks to Han The Thanh for his work on this!
>
> JK
>
>
>
>
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