Micro-typography aims to enhance readability through subtle refinements between characters and lines that should ideally go unnoticed. TEX already handles hyphenation, justification, kerning and ligatures well, while user can specify spacing around punctuation. Recent versions of TEX also support long-standing techniques like character protrusion and font expansion, making TEX a powerful tool for both electronic documents and works of fine typography.
Micro-typography aims to enhance readability through subtle refinements between characters and lines that should ideally go unnoticed. TEX already handles hyphenation, justification, kerning and ligatures well, while user can specify spacing around punctuation. Recent versions of TEX also support long-standing techniques like character protrusion and font expansion, making TEX a powerful tool for both electronic documents and works of fine typography.
Micro-typography aims to enhance readability through subtle refinements between characters and lines that should ideally go unnoticed. TEX already handles hyphenation, justification, kerning and ligatures well, while user can specify spacing around punctuation. Recent versions of TEX also support long-standing techniques like character protrusion and font expansion, making TEX a powerful tool for both electronic documents and works of fine typography.
Micro-typography is the art of enhancing the appearance and readability of a
document while exhibiting a minimum degree of visual obtrusion. It is concerned with what happens between or at the margins of characters, words or lines. Whereas the macro-typographical aspects of a document (i.e., its layout) are clearly visible even to the untrained eye, micro-typographical renements should ideally not even be recognisable. That is, you may think that a document looks beautiful, but you might not be able to tell exactly why: good micro-typographic practice tries to reduce all potential irritations that might disturb a reader. Some essential micro-typographical aspects are already taken care of by TEX out of the box and in an outstanding manner namely, hyphenation and justication, as well as kerning and ligatures. Other aspects are in the users scope of responsi- bilities, e.g., to specify the right amounts of spacing around punctuation characters, numbers, or quotation marks. On top of this, a number of long-standing micro- typographic techniques have been introduced to the TEX world relatively recently with pdfTEX, and have since also propagated to LuaTEX and XTEX. These features make them the tool of choice not only for the creation of electronic documents but also of works of outstanding time-honoured typography: most prominently, character protrusion (also known as margin kerning) and font expansion. Quoting Han The Thanh, the author of pdfTEX, who writes in his thesis: 1