Hi, /cwm (compwordmark) in AGL or #200C in Unicode, see: http://www.unicode.org/charts (ZERO WIDTH NON JOINER) is a glyph with zero width which is intended to mark word boundaries. In German, the word "Auflage" should not contain an "fl"-ligature because it is composed from two words. There is a macro which allows for breaking such ligatures in german.sty and babel[german]. The glyph /cwm has never been used by TeX but Walter considers to make use of it in the future. The advantage would be that the behaviour of the TeX macro which breaks ligatures at word boundaries will depend on the font, while it is unaware of the font currently in use now. If I understood Walter correctly, he wants to add kerning at such word boundaries in a way that the amount of kerning depends on the current font. Currently the same amount of kerning is applied to all fonts. However, I'm sure that the glyph /cwm is missing in many fonts. On the other hand, if we need kerning, we do not need a special glyph from a font, create a virtual font with modified metrics, and so on. When we have OTF support some day, I assume that we need some new primitives anyway which support additional metrics derived from OTF files which are not supported by \fontdimen. As far as I can see, it's reasonable to add a new primitive so that you can write \font\myfont=xyz \myfont \compwordkern\font = .2em The TeX macro which breaks ligatures then can insert \compwordkern for the current font. This way we can have different kernings for different fonts and we are completey independ of the fonts we use. And, of course, I assume that microtype.sty will hide all the low-level stuff... Regards, Reinhard -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reinhard Kotucha Phone: +49-511-4592165 Marschnerstr. 25 D-30167 Hannover mailto:reinhard.kotucha@web.de ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------