On Wed, Jan 29, 2014, Werner Lemberg wrote: > Letter-spacing is bad in general.
I find this statement a bit too broad, especially in the context of groff, whose only means of justifying lines presently is through the expansion of wordspace, often with ghastly results. Have a look at the first page of pdf output of typesetting.mom in the mom examples files. Admittedly, the example given shows letterspacing used in a rag context, but it's very hard not to agree that the "massaged" passage using very small amounts of letterspacing (expanded and reduced) is typographically superior to the unmassaged version. > A better solution is font expansion, as implemented e.g. in > pdflatex. Unfortunately, MM fonts have been abandoned... In which case, one has to ask: is justification through wordspacing alone, as is the case with groff now, a superior solution to implementing word-and letter-spacing? Not that I don't want to agree with you, but the realities of groff currently, plus the absence of Multiple Master fonts, make finding alternative solutions a must, hence my suggestion of incorporating letterspacing. Not a perfect solution, but one that can be implemented and that is, to my eye, superior to what we have now. > Given today's memory abundance and the high velocity of CPUs, the > ideal route would be to implement a document-wide algorithm for > typesetting a document (in contrast to TeX's page-wide approach). Completely agree. The Holy Grail of typesetting. Do you think it will ever come to be? -- Peter Schaffter http://www.schaffter.ca
