Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!uupsi!sunic!chalmers.se!cs.chalmers.se!jeffrey
From: jeffrey@cs.chalmers.se (Alan Jeffrey)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: Space around CM characters (overlong and overpolemical)
Message-ID: <4414@undis.cs.chalmers.se>
Date: 19 Mar 91 14:14:44 GMT
References: <4411@undis.cs.chalmers.se>
Sender: news@cs.chalmers.se
Organization: Dept. of CS, Chalmers, Sweden
Lines: 30

As a (slightly more constructive) followup to my previous posting
about display fonts...  One solution would be to create a virtual font
that acts as a pointer to the font you'd like to use for display
material, only with an extra character added (chuck out something you
don't need, like the hard space character).  This new character would
have zero width, no black ink, and would kern in such a fashion as to
remove the side-bearings and add in some correction for slant.  This
could then be used as an `edge of line' character in display.  So
(writing _ for `edge of line')

   \hbox to \textwidth{\it_This is a display\hfil yalpsid a si sihT_}\hrule

would come out as

   This is a display                     yalpsid a si sihT
   -------------------------------------------------------

rather than

    This is a display                     yalpsid a si sihT
   -------------------------------------------------------

which is what you get at the moment.

Does this seem reasonable?  (Mind you, it means yet another
non-standard character-set encoding, sigh...)

Alan.
Alan Jeffrey         Tel: +46 31 72 10 98         jeffrey@cs.chalmers.se
Department of Computer Sciences, Chalmers University, Gothenburg, Sweden