[texhax] Justification through glyph variants

[Khaled Hosny]

On Fri, Dec 02, 2011 at 06:54:15AM -0500, Joel C. Salomon wrote:
> In some older Hebrew books, and in Hebrew calligraphy, a technique used
> to align text to the outer margin is stretching letters.  Certain
> letters are particularly stretchable; in fact, Unicode has several "wide
> letters" encoded in the Alphabetic Presentation Forms area.
> 
> For reference, compare:
> 
>    א = ﬡ, ד = ﬢ, ה = ﬣ, כ = ﬤ, ל = ﬥ, ם = ﬦ, ר = ﬧ, ת = ﬨ.
> 
> At any rate, is there any way to make (any version of) TeX use these to
> help justify lines?

ConTeXt has an experimental support for justification through glyph
alternates (for Arabic), it requires support in the font (OpenType
features that when applied will change word width), check the file
node-spl.mkiv (part of ConTeXt) for some documentation and examples.

I never used it myself, though, not yet.

Regards,
 Khaled