![]() titling environment for a tighter appearance. in footnotes, and to decrease it in a larger, e.g. It's good practice, among those with the right tools and proper know-how, to increase tracking for very small text, to improve readability e.g. ![]() One may also note that minute adjustments of the space between letters of a fount, uniformly throughout the entire text (›tracking‹), are a common way to (1) deal with type of inferior quality, such as when we have to use a fount that's simply badly spaced (or spaced with other uses in mind than your own), as in too loosely or too tightly, and to (2) adjust type for certain point sizes above or below reading size. Then there's considerations of historical ›correctness‹, such as when a typographic project follows a specific model that happens to include letterspaced lowercase. Blackletter type, for example, has seen somewhat of a revival, and in that context letterspacing is a common and perfectly legitimate way of emphasising text. Plus, there's still situations where letterspaced lowercase simply has to be used. In a ›light‹ context though, such as in bibliographies with lots of abbreviations, it'll lose its emphasising effects, which allows it to be used for purposes of differentiation instead.« (Willberg/Forssmann 1997: ›Lesetypgraphie‹) In a ›thick‹ surrounding, it'll act as more active emphasis that draws attention to itself in a somewhat shady way. Its effects will vary depending on its typographic surroundings. »Letterspaced lowercase is a particularly hard-to-master way of emphasis in which only master typographers should get involved. It remains sensible to teach people to stop stealing sheep, but then again, rules are there to be broken (by those who've mastered them). PS, re: stealing at the time when the doctrine to stop letterspacing lowercase text was issued, there were good paedagogical reasons for it, and its effects - the almost exclusive use of italics instead of letterspacing for emphasis purposes - were indeed a step forward in terms of text esthetics. \lsstyle is a regular attribute in my sectioning styles when using all-caps or small caps. I've been using both fontspec and microtype in pretty much all of my documents for a couple of years now, and haven't noticed any mutual intolerances. The Renderer=Basic problem that you mention seems to have been fixed. I believe the saying comes from Frederic Goudy who once said 'Anyone who would letterspace blackletter would steal sheep.' Although it is commonly misquoted as 'Anyone who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep.' I can't remember why, I think someone gave him an award with letterspaced blackletter that he did not like. ![]() It'll cancel the preceding, unnecessary whitespace in front of the first letter that \textls would produce in that situation. In addition to \textls, microtype provides \textls* for use at the beginning of a line. Microtype provides \textls, which you can use for local ad-hoc specification of the tracking amount. Whereas fontspec won't work outside the realm of Lua and XeTeX, microtype is compatible with pdfTeX as well, making it a lot easier to transfer a document between those two realms if necessary. Microtype's feature has been around for some 10 years now it's tried and tested, and its benefits and limitations seem well documented. However, there's a couple of reasons to prefer the functional equivalent provided by microtype ( \textls and \lsstyle). However, because of the problems with printing and exporting to PDF when stretching fonts, I would encourage you to try to find fonts whose existing standard weights give you the condensed or expanded look you require, as those will always work more reliably.As of March 2015, to my knowledge there's no reason not to use LetterSpace=. This, at least, is a purely cosmetic problem and once you close the editor you should see the text appears correctly with no truncation. ![]() The problem you are seeing in the editor when changing the stretch factor is also a bug in Qt itself. If they are unwilling to fix it then we also have the option of making fixes ourselves, though obviously we prefer to be working on the functionality of our application rather than fixing bugs in the framework we’re using. We have reported this problem to their developers and hope that it will be resolved in future. The problem with the letter spacing and stretch not being correctly reproduced in the PDF is due to one or more bugs in the underlying Qt framework upon which Dorico relies. Welcome to the forum, MC, and sorry to leave you waiting for a reply for several days.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |