Re: Justification of first & last chars in lines

[Matthias Clasen <maclas gmx de>]

On Thu, 2003-01-30 at 19:36, Damon Chaplin wrote:
> 
> When justifying text, for the first & last characters in the line should
> we use the ink_rect to line up the ink down the margins?
> Or is it normal to just use the logical_rect?
> 
> i.e. does anyone know what InDesign/Quark do?
> 

What you need for really high quality typography is optical margin
correction, ie kerning against imaginary boundary characters inserted at
the beginning and end of the line. This is what programs like InDesign
and Quark offer. For information about the integration of such features
in the TeX engine, see Han The Thans thesis (or see the pdftex sources).
Note that if you want to get really picky, the change in linewidth due
to margin kerning (and other micro-typographic whitespace fiddling) must
be taken into account when calculating optimal line breaks.

Matthias