4 ms·
> I think it's just a pity that LaTeX with microtype is still the pinnacle of automatic typesetting, after all these years. I really enjoy good typography, but
by JadeNB 2y ago
> I think it's just a pity that LaTeX with microtype is still the pinnacle of automatic typesetting, after all these years. I really enjoy good typography, but the Web, App and even Desktop world seems not to care about such details, apart from a few programs like Ableton.
I have only a tyro's appreciation for typography, so please forgive my uninformed question. Is it a pity that LaTeX+microtype is the pinnacle of automatic typesetting because it's not good enough, or because it's non-web-focused and there is no web analogue of equivalent quality?
- v1ne 2y agoIt's a pity I feel because microtype is from 2004. That's 20 years ago. Yet, typesetting on the web is still ... not there? I think there's a lot of potential untapped. Also, the full feature set of microtype is only supported with (Pdf)LaTeX, but not with the newer XeLaTex, meaning that in order to get your favourite fonts to work with PdfLaTex, you have to do a hilarious amount of work to translate an OTF font into specific cuts in MetaFont, the LaTeX font format, and so on. I mean, I understand that things get pretty tricky once you try to integrate such schemes into a font renderer. There's other scripts than just Latin, with probably very different rules, there are different font sizes, text sizes, etc. A lot of variables to take into account. A lot of variables that were constants when typesetting on a page. So the problem is now more complicated than in the past.