[pdftex] Han The Thanh's thesis on microtypography

[Hans Hagen]

At 07:42 PM 2/4/2002 -0800, Ben Crowell wrote:
>Would anyone like to give some guidance to one
>uneducated in typography about how to choose margin
>kerning parameters? I tried activating margin kerning for
>my book, which is typeset using LaTeX's default serif font
>(computer modern?) at 11 pt. To my untrained eye, the margin
>kerning correction seemed too big -- the result looked /less/
>optically straight. This surprised me, since the samples in
>Han The Thanh's thesis looked much better to me with
>margin kerning than without. I then edited protcode.tex,
>reducing by a factor of 2 every value that was >100. The
>result seemed better to me. I could provide PDF examples if
>it would be helpful, but there's nothing unusual about what I'm
>doing --- the text is 113 mm wide, on letter-size paper. I'm
>using teTeX on MacOS X. This is the current version of teTeX; I
>just downloaded it last night. (I recall reading somewhere that
>for a while teTeX had some kind of bug in margin kerning...?)
>
>Is this just a case where the novice's perceptions are different
>from the conoisseur's? The first time I saw antialiased
>fonts, I thought they looked horrible; now they look normal to me,
>and unaliased fonts look bad. Or are the default parameters
>in protcode.tex only appropriate for very large type sizes, like
>the ones in the samples in the thesis?

I'll send you a bunch of samples with different strength settings with the 
effective vectors shown in 2/3/4 columns. Maybe that helps

Hans
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