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I've just realised that this question might be interpreted as a duplicate of Accessing side-bearings in LuaTeX, and therefore eligible to be closed as such. Apologies for the lapse of memory; I'll leave the community to close one or the other.

I'm slowly (as always) coming to the conclusion that I should make the move from Xe- to Lua-(La)TeX, but, as far as I can see, there is still one last obstacle.

In XeLaTeX, I can do this:

\def\kright#1{\leavevmode #1\kern-\XeTeXglyphbounds3 \the\XeTeXcharglyph`#1 }
\def\kleft#1{\leavevmode \kern-\XeTeXglyphbounds1 \the\XeTeXcharglyph`#1 #1}

Which compensates for left or right sidebearings, and allows me to align the 'edge' of text precisely (See, for example, this answer to The perfect PDF crop and also this question: Precision copyfitting in xcoffin.

I believe these sidebearing measurements may be available within LuaTeX, but so far have not been able even to get close to finding the document that will tell me how to do it. Can someone help?

BTW, I know that microtype can do something similar, but I understand that it's driven by an external table which takes a lot of effort to set up -- I'm looking for the general solution for an arbitrary (Open Type, probably) font.

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Brent.Longborough
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  • But your XeTeX solution does not seem very robust to me, what happens if I want to fit the word “fit” and the side bearing of the “fi” ligature is not the same as “f”, what about Arabic or any other script with heavy glyph substitution or even reordering? – خالد حسني Feb 06 '13 at 16:35
  • @KhaledHosny : I agree completely, it isn't robust, but its better than nothing. I'd certainly welcome a better suggestion! – Brent.Longborough Feb 06 '13 at 17:00

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