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skottish

Forum Fellow

From: Here

Registered: 2006-06-16

Posts: 7,942

Does any of the *TeX's handle OTF and microtype together well?

I've been running into references for pdflatex and the microtype package a lot lately and decided to check it out. I've been using XeTeX mainly because of it's ease of handling fonts. Man was I surprised when I saw what the pdflatex/microtype combo does. Just with the default settings for microtype six of the nine hyphenated words in my test page were corrected transparently, as well as the edge started to look cleaner. The default protrusion is a bit much for my tastes, and judging from the three books that I compared it to, it is for others also. Anyway, as the title asks, does any of the *TeX's handle OTF and microtype together well?

Stefan Husmann

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2007-08-07

Posts: 1,391

Re: Does any of the *TeX's handle OTF and microtype together well?

IMHO no.

skottish

Forum Fellow

From: Here

Registered: 2006-06-16

Posts: 7,942

Re: Does any of the *TeX's handle OTF and microtype together well?

Thanks Stefan. This post was more of a curiosity than anything else. It's really not a big deal to convert fonts over to LaTeX, particularly when I only have one non-free set. Now that I have a taste for the microtype package, I can't see going any other way until there's a perfect replacement.

mintcoffee

Member

From: Waterloo, ON

Registered: 2007-10-05

Posts: 120

Website

Re: Does any of the *TeX's handle OTF and microtype together well?

I remember reading that while it's on XeTeX's TODO list, it was rather difficult to implement in practice. So essentially, you're stuck with the traditional PDFLaTeX if you want microtype for now.

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skottish

Forum Fellow

From: Here

Registered: 2006-06-16

Posts: 7,942

Re: Does any of the *TeX's handle OTF and microtype together well?

One thing that I came across while doing some research is the idea that microtype with expansion increases the file size. I did a test. I have multiple copies of the same document, one with XeTeX and one with LaTeX using microtype. The XeTeX file is 31.9KB and the LaTeX file is 186.1KB. This is a very simply two page document, embedded fonts, and only one font family used. Can I expect the same ~5.8 times file size increase when using microtype?

--EDIT--

Well gee whiz. Wrong again. It's not even microtype that's causing the file growth, it's the fonts. In both cases it's from the same set of fonts, but for pdfLaTeX they were converted from OTF. Adding a whole bunch of pages onto the end of the document barely increased the file size. Nice.

Last edited by skottish (2008-11-15 02:38:30)