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Hi, I did some (quite heavy) changes on pdftex to support font expansion, so it can be used easily. So far the font expansion feature requires that user must be able to create expanded tfm (eg cmr10+10.tfm). Now font expansion can be used without expanded tfm. One can say: \font\f=cmr10 \pdffontexpand\f 20 20 5 autoexpand and pdftex will create those expanded tfm like cmr10+10, cmr10-20, etc. automatically. This also works for virtual fonts (like ptmr8t). The sources tarball is available at http://vntex.sourceforge.net/private/thanh/pdftex/pdftex-2004_05_02.tar.bz2 [to Hans Hagen: the djgpp binary of pdfxtex is avail. at the same location] I didn't submit this version to the texlive repository yet, because I changed the sources quite a lot and it can introduce new bugs. For those interested in details of automatical font expansion: 1) a tfm is expanded by copying the metrics from the base tfm, then character widths, kerns and italic corrections are adjusted. 2) for virtual fonts: nothing is changed apart from local font definitions (they are automatically expanded just like (1)). This means that some accents can be misplaced by a very small amount (0.01--0.01pt). If this amount seems too much to you, then the wokraround is to create expanded tfm manually. A minimal test file can look like: ======================================= \pdffontexpand\font 20 20 5 autoexpand \pdfadjustspacing 2 <A few long paragraphs here> \bye ======================================= Then open the pdf file in acroreader and look at File->Info->Fonts, or use pdffonts (comes from xpdf) to see whether the body font is expanded. What is font expansion good for? 1) if you care about micro-typography like even word spacing and greyness of your pages; 2) if you are typesetting narrow columns and would like to get rid of those overfull/underfull boxes or frequent hyphenations with none (or liltle) manual tweaking. Feedbacks are welcome very much. Thanh PS: this version also fixes the problem with \mag