On Sat, 20 Nov 2004, Juergen Spitzmueller wrote:
"Margin kerning is the adjustments of the characters at the margins of a typeset text. A simplified employment of margin kerning is hanging punctuation. Margin kerning is needed for optical alignment of the margins of a typeset text, because mechanical justification of the margins makes them look rather ragged. Some characters can make a line appear shorter to the human eye than others. Shifting such characters by an appropriate amount into the margins would greatly improve the appearance of a typeset text.
Composing with font expansion is the method to use a wider or narrower variant of a font to make interword spacing more even. A font in a loose line can be substituted by a wider variant so the interword spaces are stretched by a smaller amount. Similarly, a font in a tight line can be replaced by a narrower variant to reduce the amount that the interword spaces are shrunk by. There is certainly a potential danger of font distortion when using such manipulations, thus they must be used with extreme care. The potentiality to adjust a line width by font expansion can be taken into consideration while a paragraph is being broken into lines, in order to choose better breakpoints."
Jürgen,
Wow! Mere mortals such as I am do not care about the minutia of typography and page layout. We leave that to you experts. I'm really glad that I don't have to be concerned with such things in order to produce fine looking text output; especially since my older LaserJet 5 does "only" 600 dpi.
When the TeXpert at Springer-New York asked me to replace \textellipsis with \ldots in my book (which will be submitted tomorrow, by the way), I looked up the differences in TLC2, shrugged and went back to work.
Thanks for a complete and meaningful explanation. I'll now return you to your regularly scheduled weekend activities.
Rich
-- Dr. Richard B. Shepard, President Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. (TM) <http://www.appl-ecosys.com> Voice: 503-667-4517 Fax: 503-667-8863
