[Groff] [off] micro-typography

[Stewart C. Russell]

Delete now unless you like the geekly minutiae of quality book 
typography. 0% to do with groff, too.

I've just read Han The Thanh's thesis on micro-typographical extensions
to pdfTeX. Basically, this makes TeX's already very good line-breaking
algorithm look much better, by (amongst other things):

* fiddling character widths very slightly

* allowing certain characters (hyphen, comma, etc) to protrude very
slightly into the right margin.

You can read Thanh's thesis here (set in his modified pdfTeX, so it's
lovely):

http://www.fi.muni.cz/~thanh/download/thesis.pdf

(2441127 bytes)

Adobe InDesign uses bits of the near-legendary 'hz' algorithm, but 
apparently doesn't use it all. Thanh appears to have implemented it 
more completely.

 Stewart

-- 
Stewart C. Russell CEng MBCS    Senior Analyst Programmer
address@hidden  Collins Dictionaries
use Disclaimer; my $opinion;    Bishopbriggs, Scotland