I followed the discussion about international documents for a while, then yesterday, reading a German math book, it occurred to me that the following point (as far as I can remember) has not been discussed: It seems standard in German mathematical typesetting to use letterspacing for "emphasis" (e.g. for defining words), while italics are reserved for theorems and such. So this concerns only a "sublanguage", rather than default German typography. On the other hand the problem seems to be general enough to have a solution within LaTeX. I am aware that Don Knuth calls letterspacing in TeX a "bad idea" and would prefer to have fonts with custom made kerns for wider inter-letter-spaces. However, with the advance of NFSS and the wide proliferation of fonts from different sources this seems to pose unnecessary constraints on the user, with at best epsilon improvement in the output. So I think there is a good case for this to be handled automatically by TeX/LaTeX. The currently available letterspace package does not seem adequate because of its non-LaTeX syntax and the fact that it breaks the kerning between pairs of letters, which does look bad especially for small spacing factors. I have a modified version of letterspace due to Donald Arsenau which solves the latter problem, and proves that this can be done without modifying TeX (although I guess modifying TeX could provide a more stable solution). Marcel