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. Robert Bringhurst tags: humor, type, typography 9 likes Like Essay on Adam' There are five possibilities. If this wisdom needs updating, it is chiefly to add that a woman who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep as well. 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. A man who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep, Frederic Goudy liked to say. 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. 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). Good typography is like bread: ready to be admired, appraised, and dissected before it is consumed.As of March 2015, to my knowledge there's no reason not to use LetterSpace=. They also push it toward the realm of candy and drugs, which tend to provoke dependent responses, and away from the realm of food, which tends to promote autonomous being. Logotypes and logograms push typography in the direction of hieroglyphics, which tend to be looked at rather than read. Typographers, in keeping with the virtue of their trade, honor the stewardship of texts and implicitly oppose private ownership of words. But type is visible speech, in which gods and men, saints and sinners, poets and business executives are treated fundamentally alike. In earlier days it was kings and deities whose agents demanded that their names be written in a larger size or set in a specially ornate typeface now it is business firms and mass-market products demanding an extra helping of capitals, or a proprietary face, and poets pleading, by contrast, to be left entirely in the vernacular lower case. An increasing number of persons and institutions, from archy and mehitabel to PostScript and TrueType, come to the the typographer in search of special treatment. “Logograms pose a more difficult question.
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