Fonts & Character Sets ⇒ Problem with word spacing in utopia font

[stupidus]

I am using the adobe-utopia font via the mathdesign package for my PhD thesis. The font looks overall very nice, so I would like to keep it. However, there is a small problem with the word spacing if a word that ends with an "f" is followed by a word that starts with a capital "T". In that case the spacing between these two words looks too small. In a flowing text, but also in section headings, this looks a bit disturbing. The microtype package with the default settings does not really improve this.

Is there a way to somehow modify the font, or some setting to use in order to enlarge the word spacing only for this special case?
Of course, I could manually add something like \hspace{0.3em} at the appropriate places, but this is sort of an ugly workaround, and I am not sure if it would still look good in a justified text.

MWE:

Code: Select all

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[adobe-utopia]{mathdesign}
% Optionally:
\usepackage{microtype}

\begin{document}

\section{Applications of Temperature}
Applications of Temperature
\end{document}

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hello!

You could use the features of microtype or the letterspace package. Take a look at the microtype manual, page 23 and 24 "Letterspacing revisited", command \SetTracking. I just cannot test myself, since I'm traveling right now.

Stefan

[stupidus]

Thank you!
I looked into the SetTracking command, but I could not find how to set it up to only affect the "f T" letter combination. So, I would still need to manually set \textls in every case. Also I could not find, how to make it only affect the word spacing in a reliable way. The following does not really work.

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\SetTracking[ spacing = {100,,}]{encoding = *}{0}
%...
Applications \textls*{of Temperature}

The best result I got so far by leaving \SetTracking at the default values, and use the following:

Code: Select all

Applications o\textls*{f T}emperature

It looks really ugly in the .tex file, but it looks quite ok in the pdf.