Re: Re: IMPORTANT: (possibly) incompatible Change

[Karsten Heymann <karsten.heymann@blue-cable.net>]

Hi Carsten,

Carsten Dominik <carsten.dominik@gmail.com> writes:
> On Apr 6, 2010, at 2:30 PM, Karsten Heymann wrote:
>> Carsten Dominik <carsten.dominik@gmail.com> writes:
>>> \usepackage[AUTO]{inputenc}
>>> \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
>>> \usepackage{graphicx}
>>> \usepackage{longtable}
>>> \usepackage{float}
>>> \usepackage{wrapfig}
>>> \usepackage{soul}
>>> \usepackage{latexsym}
>>> \usepackage{amssymb}
>>> \usepackage{hyperref}
>
> Do you have any recommendations for the sequence in which these
> packages should be called?  Or does that make no difference at all?
> Does any of these cause problems if they are called twice (say I
> add them, but users have them configured already?)

The only critical one is hyperref, which should always be loaded last
(see
http://tug.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/hyperref/doc/manual.html#x1-30002).

> What is is really changing due to these last two
> settings (microtype) and tolerance, could you explain in a bit more
> detail?

I will try to explain it in my own poor words. microtype activates
advanced functions of the pdftex compiler (nowadays the standard TeX
compiler used by all distributions) to perform various subtle output
modifications, like shifting letters a tiny bit into the right margin so
that the margin looks *visually* aligned. Also it stretches and pulls
letters for tiny amounts so words fit better into paragraphs without
standing into the margin.

This is also the area where \tolerance takes action. It's a low level
TeX directive that controls how much the whitespace between words may
differ in width when typesetting a justified paragraph (I'm not sure
what the correct translation of the German word "Blocksatz" is). It's a
number in the range between 0 and 9999 (plus the special 10.000 meaning
infinite for TeX ;-) ). The standard value 200 is way much too
perfectionist for normal day-to-day typesetting, especially when writing
in languages where typical words are much longer then in English, like
German for example. Normal Desktop Text processors always operate in
"10.000"-Mode, meaning there's an infinite amount of whitespace allowed
between words, with the result of possibly large holes between the words
to keep the right margin aligned. TeX on the other hand will deny to
typeset paragraphs when it cannot find a solution (for the full
paragraph!) inside it's tolerance limits and write words into the right
margin so the author can manually fix the situation (rephrase, fix
hyphenation, ...). Tolerance values up to 2000 still look much better
than anything from Word/OOo and reduce the need to manually correct
these problems (and to explain this stuff to new users).

> And: Can I expect fixltx2e to be present in all distributions?

Yes, it's part of the latex base packages and thus always available
(given any not really really ancient LaTeX installation, e.g. more than
a decade).

> Is \tolerance defined in microtype, or did you put these together just
> incidentally?

They are completely independent.

>> Karsten
>
> I really appreciate expert advice about this.  Thank you.

I'm more than glad my rusty LaTeX knowledge is of any use, especially to
the awesome org-mode community (and it's even more awesome author). If
you want advice from some *real* experts, ask in the comp.text.tex or
the de.comp.text.tex newsgroup. That's a completely different level, I'm
just some kind of semi-power-user that had too much time on university.

Yours
Karsten