Interletter spacing in plain TeX

Question

Is it possible globally to change the interletter spacing in plain TeX?

score 7 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 01 '15 at 17:52

7

It's quite easy with pdftex; adjust the 100 to suit: the value adds 10% to each character width (but the excess space is trimmed out at line breaks, of course).

\input plipsum % mock text

% the font we want to space out
\font\tensc=cmcsc10
\letterspacefont\spacedtensc\tensc 100

\lipsum{2}

{\spacedtensc\lipsum{3}}

{\tensc\lipsum{3}}

\bye

answered Sep 01 '15 at 17:52

egreg

1,121,712

Also with XeTeX with its 'letterspacing' font loading option. – morbusg Sep 01 '15 at 20:02
@morbusg Yes, but that's only for OpenType/TrueType/Graphite fonts, not for native TeX ones. – egreg Sep 01 '15 at 20:04
Yep, OP doesn't say whether that is the case, so I thought to mention it. – morbusg Sep 01 '15 at 20:07

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 01 '15 at 17:00

There are some possibilities:

You can manipulate the font sources (when they are written in METAFONT, there is a parameter letter_fit usually set to 0pt# in the source files like cmr10.mf).
You can write some advanced macros to parse the stream of letters entering TeX's mouth and add letterspacing, see, e.g., this article: Phil Taylor Letterspacing in TEX, TUGboat 14(2), p. 141–145, https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb14-2/tb39taylor-letterspacing.pdf

Interletter spacing in plain TeX

2 Answers2

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