5. Juli 2010 – 14:11
I was recently browsing sample PDF pages from a major german, alleged typographically pretentious publisher in the humanities, as I noticed the use of wrong range-dashes and poorly justified paragraphs. Since the PDF was made with 3B2, this finally encouraged me, to compare TeX's abilities on a real-life paragraph. I tried to reproduce the original parameters like text width, font size and leading, etc. as much as possible. The original uses letter tracking, which IMHO, is not necessary for that font and leads only to poor kerning pairs (like in "Tr").
First Blood
Below is the sample paragraph by 3B2.
It has many disadvantages:
quite loose lines
no ligatures
no optical margins
use of tracking
Disproportionate Response
My first try was with the state of the art pdftex with activated font expansion and optical margins through the LaTeX package microtype without any tweaking. The result is smashing: pdftex produces much better, thight lines, ...
Posted in Code, English, Examples, LaTeX, TeX, Typography, Umbruch | 4 Comments »