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From: eijkhout@s41.csrd.uiuc.edu (Victor Eijkhout)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: Can character "coloring" be altered within TeX?
Message-ID: <1991Mar28.163342.22523@csrd.uiuc.edu>
Date: 28 Mar 91 16:33:42 GMT
References: <1991Mar26.233116.26641@rodan.acs.syr.edu>
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Organization: UIUC Center for Supercomputing Research and Development
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edelsohn@sccs.syr.edu (David Edelsohn) writes:

>	I believe that the term "coloring" is used by professional
>typesetters to describe intercharacter spacing, i.e. the look of a document
>when the character kerning is uniformly wider or narrower than usual.

Intercharacter spacing is certainly one of the aspects of colour.

> The closest parameter is the \sfcode table, but I
>cannot find any mechanism whereby all of the entries may be quickly changed
>by a uniform factor.  Currently I am kerning each and every character to
>obtain the correct spacing.  Is there any better solution?

Not an easy one. You could for instance make every character
active, and let it stand for a command that will place that
character plus a bit of space. Apart from the obvious drawback
that you can then *only* write plain text, no commands,
this will destroy any kerning information the tfm file has.

Sorry to say that what you want is indeed a component of
high quality typesetting systems, but not of TeX, as yet.
However, I fail to see why you would want different colours
in one document. Wouldn't the result be what is generally
called 'a mess'?

Victor.