[texhax] Tex Queries (3): Cases for italic correction

[William Adams]

On Jul 24, 2012, at 1:34 PM, Pierre MacKay wrote:

> By the way, I wish DEK had included two more \fontdimens as part of the usual set for regular book fonts.  I have to add the equivalent of Adobe's ascender height and descender depth as additional \fontdimens to any font I regularly use.  That is the only way to ensure that the \strut is proportional to the specific font, with \strutheight and \strutdepth available for line spacing adjustments in whatever leading is in use.  Quite important for insertions of CJK characters, etc., in a line of Roman type.

While I can appreciate the desire, if I understand correctly, the newer TeX variants, XeTeX and LuaTeX do afford this information, albeit somewhat indirectly by making the overall bounding box accessible, so one can compare box heights / depths to calculate these values.

There's a specific key for turning this on in XeTeX (I think I argued successfully for it being turned on by default) --- see if there's discussion of the Adobe Caslon example in the xetex mailing list.

William

-- 
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.