> There are some situations where I'd like to be able to adjust spacing > between letters (mainly in titles and headlines for commercial copy) > for special effects. I suppose I could force it by putting \h'...' > between characters, but that's a pain.
I use .tkf for this. The description for this request is a little misleading: "the width of every glyph is increased by an amount between N1 and N2" makes it sound like the glyphs are stretched horizontally. In fact, .tkf merely adds space after each glyph. I think it's a poorly implemented request. Since the documentation states one of the problems -- "the track kerning amount is added even to the rightmost glyph in a line" -- I suppose this can't technically be called a bug, but there would seem to be almost no situations where this would be desired behavior. And the suggested workaround -- "increase the line length by the same amount to compensate it" -- is unworkable for a number of reasons. (Two reasons are that "the same amount," in the general case, requires a ponderous calculation to determine; and that using .ll to change the line length doesn't even take effect until the next line.) I suspect this request was implemented with the idea that it would only be used to make small enough adjustments that the extra space at the end of the line wouldn't be easily noticeable, but I can think of no good reason why this request should produce that extra space at all. For titles and headlines, this likely isn't a concern, so it may suit your purposes.
