Mike Speciner wrote:
There was this company called Composition Technology [CTI] in the early '70s ... The software knew about fonts and characters and did kerning to properly position operators, sub- and superscripts, over and under characters [e.g., accents, overbars, sum and integral limits], particularly important with the beautiful Times Italic font. AFAIK, no one does kerning anymore, and so special, more upright fonts are used to make things look less bad.
TeX is semi-smart about these things. It doesn't have separate positions for each (character,accent) pair -- it has general facilities for kerning, of course, but accented characters aren't considered instances of that -- but does let you say "this font slants by so much, so adjust accents accordingly". Empirically, I haven't noticed TeX-typeset accent positions being bad. (There *are* positioning and spacing things TeX does that I find very unsatisfactory, but that isn't one.) But then, I suspect that our tastes differ. I agree that the Times italic is elegant, but I find its roman so ugly that I'd never use it. I too would be interested in examples of books typeset with CTI's software. -- g