For those who like to live on the cutting (bleeding?) edge, there is a new 
version of xetex available in the source repository. Version 0.9996.0 is now 
available from the svn repository at:

   http://scripts.sil.org/svn-public/xetex/BRANCHES/microtype

This version supports "character protrusion", also known as margin kerning. The 
character protrusion feature is enabled by setting the parameter 
\XeTeXprotrudechars, equivalent to pdftex's \pdfprotrudechars.

The protrusion values are set using \lpcode and \rpcode. For TFM fonts, these 
work in the same way as the pdftex versions; for non-TFM (i.e. native 
TrueType/OpenType) fonts, they accept either a Unicode character code (prefixed 
by the keyword "unicode"), a glyph name (prefixed by "name"), or a glyph 
number. Thus, in the example:

    \font\x = "Charis SIL" at 10pt

    \rpcode \x unicode "2C = 100
    \rpcode \x name "comma" = 100
    \rpcode \x 15 = 100

the three \rpcode lines all have the exact same effect, as the comma glyph in 
this font has glyph ID 15.

In most cases, setting character protrusion values via Unicode codepoints will 
be the simplest and most robust approach; glyph names and glyph IDs are 
provided for cases such as contextual forms that are not directly accessible 
via Unicode character codes.

Note that LaTeX packages such as pdfcprot and microtype will not automatically 
work with this feature, but it should be possible to update them to recognize 
the new xetex version and handle it appropriately without too much difficulty.

Many thanks to Han The Thanh for his work on this!

JK




--------------------------------------------------
Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.:
  http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex

Reply via email to