On 31.07.10 12:14, Hans Hagen wrote:
Also, expansion happens on a per-line base.
If that were the case then expansion would indeed be rather useless. Fortunately, it is not true. Expansion takes place during paragraph-breaking, where even a minimal (that is, (almost) invisible) expansion amount may reduce the badness, the number of hyphenations, and overfull boxes quite substantially.
- Protrusion was seen as a bug.
Then it was probably overdone (eg., hyphens protruding by their full width).
- No differences were see in many cases (we used 600 dpi high quality prints). - Extremes like stretched wide o's in one line and shrunken ones in the following ones went unnoticed (so much for claims to see details). When Thanh and I discussed that (at a Dante meeting) with Hermann Zapf he made the remark that probably 99% of the readers would not notice the difference. He also suggested that stretching lines vertically in order to get rid of widow lines was probably more effective. (I must have the tests done afterward somewhere.) What was striking is that the fact that one uses an advanced engine like tex does not mean that the user is capable of seeing the difference. If someone shows me two versions of a document probably I cannot say with 100% certainty which one has used hz.
Which is what microtypography is all about: improving the visual appearance *without being noticeable*.
Regards, -- Robert
