Thanh Han The wrote:

On Mon, Dec 11, 2006 at 11:31:54PM +0100, Hans Hagen wrote:

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Thanh Han The wrote:

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Hi all,

I am working on a primitive \letterspacefont that generates a letter-spaced font from another font like this:

,-------- | \font\f=cmr10 | \letterspacefont\fx=\f 100 % letterspace \f by a factor 100/1000 | \fx This is a text in letter-spaced cmr10 `--------

the above example creates \fx as a virtual font, in which each charater is taken from \f, and have a kern of 50*quad(f)/1000 at each side. All this happens in pdftex memory.

However I am not sure the "more right" way to do this is that each character c should have a kern of 5*width_of_c/1000 at each side, ie the kern inserted around each character is proportional to its width, instead of having a fixed global value for all characters. This is more closed to the way font expansion is done, but is different from what fontinst does for letter-spacing.

How do you see it?

Is there a way to prevent the kern before or after a char? Say that we have a section title, in that case one does not want the margin to be spoiled (the first char needs to align then)

I don't know of an easy way. But it's possible to have another primitive that returns the kern at the left resp. right side of a char from such a font.

best would be to have something \noletterspacekern (will inhibit the next kern) \removeletterspacekern (removes the last kern, a kind of unkern) so that one can say: {\fx \noletterspacekern Some Text\removeletterspacekern} (\[left|right]letterspacekern<charnr> would be handy anyway) -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------