Microtypography

Microtypography is the name given to a range of methods for improving the readability and appearance of text, especially justified text. The methods reduce the appearance of large interword spaces and create edges to the text that appear more even.

There are several methods that can be used.

The following methods are not usually considered part of microtypography, but are important to it.

Adobe InDesign provides microtypography and is based on the Hz program developed by Hermann Zapf and Peter Karow. As of August 2007^[update], InDesign is available for Apple Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

Scribus provides limited microtypography in the form of glyph extensions and optical margins. It is available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, various BSD flavours, and others.

The pdfTeX extension of TeX, developed by Hàn Thế Thành, incorporates microtypography. It is available for most operating systems. For LaTeX, the microtype package provides an interface to these microtypographic extensions; as of August 2007^[update], pdfTeX was not compatible with XeTeX, an extension of TeX that makes it easier to use many typographic features of OpenType fonts. However, in 2010, support for protrusion was added to it.

ConTeXt, another typesetting system based on TeX, offers both microtypographical features such as expansion and protrusion (a.k.a. hanging punctuation) and OpenType support through LuaTeX, which is an extended version of pdfTeX.

...
Wikipedia