TeXShopMargin Kerning
The author of pdftex, Han The Thanh, received his Ph.D. degree from Masaryk University in the Czech Republic. His Ph.D. thesis, Micro-typographic extensions to the TeX typesetting system, contains a wonderful extension to standard tex called "margin kerning."
If you look at typical TeX output, you will notice that the right margin looks somewhat ragged. In particular, lines which end with a period, comma, or hyphen do not seem to be quite as long as they should be. But if you place a ruler along the margin, you'll find that it is perfectly straight. It turns out that the earliest printers compensated for this optical illusion by pushing certain punctuation characters slightly into the margin. For instance, the Gutenberg 42-line Bible was typeset with this convention. Thanh added the feature, called "margin kerning," to pdftex.
To implement margin kerning in your document, use pdflatex rather than latex + ghostscript and add the line
- \usepackage{microtype}
near the top of your document. This will implement margin kerning and another contribution from Han The Thanh called "font expansion" to make the document appear more uniform. Use Google to find the the file "microtype.pdf", which is available from many web sites and explains this package in detail.
Use of this package may change line breaks and page breaks. It is possible to instruct the package to employ margin kerning and/or font expansion without changing line breaks by using the option "compatibility", and it is possible to turn one or the other off by using the option "false". For example
- \usepackage[protrusion={true, compatibility}, expansion=false]{microtype}