Excellent - does this mean that custom kerning from within XeTeX is moving
up the 'to-do' list....? It seems to me to be in the same general area
(aesthetically though perhaps not technically): one wants to fine-tune the
spacing behaviour of specific characters from within the program rather than
by editing the font (which may not be legal).
John
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jonathan Kew" <jonat...@jfkew.plus.com>
To: "Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms" <xetex@tug.org>
Sent: Monday, May 03, 2010 12:12 AM
Subject: [XeTeX] experimental new xetex version - with margin-kerning
support
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
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