Re: [Groff] rationale for italic correction mechanism?

[Dave Kemper]

>> You're allowing your typesetting software to paginate, to fill
>> lines, to kern, to convert character sequences to appropriate
>> ligatures, to stretch spaces for justification, to hyphenate.
>
> To be a bit pedantic here, pagination is something that's not
> completely done automatically by troff itself, but only with
> the help of a macro package.

Ah, yes.  I was using "pagination" in the sense of splitting the text
up into pages, rather than in the sense of numbering them.  But that
was an ambiguous way for me to state that.

> So what we *really* want is the ability to define appropriate
> amounts of kerning between characters belonging to different
> fonts.  Gunnar Ritter has implemented this for Heirloom troff,
> but I know of no other software which provides this capability.
> Until we have such a feature, I'm afraid we have to leave
> these things at least partly up to the person setting the text.

Thank you for this summary; that's the explanation I was looking for.
It's unfortunate that there's not more development collaboration between
groff and Heirloom troff.