Let me just add some notes to the discussion of letterspacing in the past few days: I think that letterspacing is needed (although it is ugly) and so should be available and easily usable within TeX, may be even if this takes things up to the need for properly letterspaced fonts. Let me give some examples, where letterspacing could be needed: may be its main application is not within mathematics, but in the humanities: Here you often have the problem ot markup many different layers of a text, e.g. in a quotation when you have to show the contributions of different previous authors or preliminary versions or the like; here you easily run out of standard ways of markup. Or even a more trivial example: sometimes you have to give a quotation verbatim, copiying the original markup, if there was letterspacing, you have to do that, and TeX should only help that it doesn't look too bad. I consider underlining text almost equally bad as a usual way of markup (the situation seems somehow to be italics vs. letterspacing and boldface vs. underlining), they both should be avoided whenever possible, yet there are still some cases where it is useful, and as TeX does make underlining possible, I see no reason to be so restrictive vs. letterspacing (okay, it is more difficult to do it properly, as special fonts seem to be needed) Some comments on related topics mentioned: As for Fraktur, Schwabacher came out of style as a means of emphasis around 1800, afterwards only letterspacing was used (one can find that somewhere in Tschichold's writings). So as the main usage of Fraktur seems to render something historically correct, here letterspacing is needed, too. I don't know about the treatment of ligatures, which are rather freqent in Fraktur. (I have seen a preliminary version of what is now a book about LaTeX by Axel Heilmann, published by Springer (I can't remember the title), where the author used yfrak for the main text because he likes it so much, this rendered it almost unreadable and unusuable; so keeping the usage to historic texts seems preferable...) In mathematics, different kinds of emphasis could be achieved without using letterspacing (e.g. italic for the body of theorems, bold extended for the expression being defined, bold (at normal width) for things like "Definition 3.1:" and sectioning etc.), so I don't see a need here, even if some authors do use it (and I agree that Heuser is a well typeset book in general). Verbatim quotation isn't used here in the way mentioned above, so any author could avoid letterspacing in any case. Another thing related to letterspacing is Capitalization, i.e. writing all-uppercase. Here, proper spacing is needed, too, and TeX's kerning is correct for usual text and abbreviations, but not for all-uppercase. I think Tschicholds "Meisterbuch der Schrift" (there should be an English edition, too) gives some examples of good and bad spacing, or it is elsewhere in his writings. All-uppercase needs rather wide spacing, and TeX's lacking a good way to accomplish this. May be a "titleing" font could be useful here. The bad spacing seems to be the main reason why I dislike the standard LaTeX headings (slanted and all-uppercase). Johannes Kuester -- Johannes Kuester [log in to unmask] Mathematisches Institut der Technischen Universitaet Muenchen