On 5/31/2014 4:14 PM, Rik Kabel wrote:
My issue with Dowding (and with Gill) is that they suggest that the compositor has an obligation to change the author's text, without consultation and agreement, in order to meet his concept of better page makeup. Dowding's sensitivity to the appearance of the page, on the other hand, is sadly missing from much of book publishing today.
Long ago I have been thinking of improving some \oneof {bad} {suboptimal} paragraphs by applying 'alternative' words, i.e. one could \optional {for instance} write like this.
Gross manipulation of the space factors is probably too crude to accomplish much in implementing the style Dowding promotes, although the tightness in the second tufte from your example (modifying the punctuation) may be a starting point.
With XeTeX, one can use \interchartoks to handle general (non-font-specific) kerning between punctuation and certain letter shapes (sloped left or right, ascender, descender, ...) beyond what any particular font's kerning tables provide. I see nothing in MKIV that provides this, and thought that perhaps \definecharacterspacing might fill the role. Hence the original question in this thread.
you can play with (subtle) expansion (hz) and specific stretch vectors .. imo kerning other than what the font designer has in mind is normally a bad idea; another option is to use a font with different glyphs for the same character but I don't know of such fonts Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | voip: 087 875 68 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------