Micro-typographic extensions to the TEX typesetting system

This thesis investigates the possibility to improve the quality of text composition. Two typographic extensions were examined: margin kerning and composing with font expansion. Margin kerning is the adjustments of the characters at the margins of a typeset text. A simplified employment of margin kerning is hanging punctuation. Margin kerning is needed for optical alignment of the margins of a typeset text, because mechanical justification of the margins makes them look rather ragged. Some characters can make a line appear shorter to the human eye than others. Shifting such characters by an appropriate amount into the margins would greatly improve the appearance of a typeset text. Composing with font expansion is the method to use a wider or narrower variant of a font to make interword spacing more even. A font in a loose line can be substituted by a wider variant so the interword spaces are stretched by a smaller amount. Similarly, a font in a tight line can be replaced by a narrower variant to reduce the amount that the interword spaces are shrunk by. There is certainly a potential danger of font distortion when using such manipulations, thus they must be used with extreme care. The potentiality to adjust a line width by font expansion can be taken into consideration while a paragraph is being broken into lines, in order to choose better breakpoints. These typographic extensions were implemented in pdfTEX, a derivation of TEX. Heavy experiments have been done to examine the influence of the extensions on the quality of typesetting. The extensions turned out to noticeably improve the appearance of a typeset text. A number of ‘real-world’ documents have been typeset using these typographic extensions, including this thesis.