[OS X TeX] microtype

[Alain Schremmer]

On Aug 10, 2010, at 7:47 AM, Herbert Schulz wrote:

>
> On Aug 9, 2010, at 4:18 PM, George Gratzer wrote:
>
>> I surely do. I will use it only for the final formatting.
>>
>> GG
>
> Howdy,
>
> I'm glad you've seen the beauty of using the microtype package.

I just tried it---with my vanilla font---on a 10 page article and it  
indeed evened things out. Very, very nice.

> I find it truly amazing. I never noticed the extra time since I  
> usually compile fairly short documents and the compile time isn't  
> an annoyance. I'm not surprised that it takes much longer when you  
> use font expansion since there are many more possibilities that  
> pdftex must consider for the line breaks.
>
> Once you do start to use it in the final formatting be very careful  
> to look at the page breaks, etc., since those can certainly change  
> since some paragraphs will actually get a line shorter.

True in the article but, whatever the reason, doesn't seem to be so  
on the 570 book with 18 included chapters, but that is probably  
because I tinkered too much with vspaces in the first place or  
perhaps because of the file structure. In any case, I tried microtype  
just out of idle curiosity.

> PS: do you remember when it took multiple seconds to compile a  
> page? Life was slower then. :-)

Wasn't using LaTeX until much later but I do remember the huge  
improvement (over pencil, paper ... and rubber cement) when I got my  
Fat Mac---for a lot more than I would have to pay for an iMac today--- 
and started using MacWrite.

Regards
--schremmer