[OS X TeX] pdftex 1.20a

[Alain Schremmer]

Thanks very much.
I am afraid, though, that I am not capable of extreme care and so will 
stay with plain vanilla LaTeX.
Regards
--schremmer

Alexandru Scorpan wrote:

>> No idea about the latest pdftex (1.20a) but what are "the 
>> microtypographical niceties from the new microtype package"?
>
>
> The niceties are:  Margin kerning (that was already available via the 
> pdfcprot package) and font expansion (new).  These features are best 
> explained by the following quote from HT Thanh's thesis (taken from 
> the documentation of R Schlicht's new microtype package, uploaded to 
> CTAN on 2004/9/11, available in the usual places, such as 
> http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/ ).
>
>>    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.'
>>
>
> Alex
>
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