What in microtype makes "a big difference"? I don't recall using it (my LaTeX years are long behind me), but all of the examples on https://www.khirevich.com/latex/microtype/ seem incredibly minor. I don't think I'd notice any of them as the reader.

It will tweak spacing, kerning, margin protrusion, and font size to improve readability avoid big word gaps and excessive end-of-line hyphenation.

It is what sets professional typography apart. Only Adobe InDesign provides a comparable implementation, tweaking all those details.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hz-program for a better explanation and an example.

IMHO, the difference is obvious and not minor. Without microtypography texts look ugly: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Hz_Progr...

Sure, I don't like creeks like in your last example. But I absolutely prefer paragraphs, where the final line would be considered 'too short'. It also makes an appreciable impact for me, in how easy a text is to read.

Which is to say, half of these things are pretty subjective.

> Only Adobe InDesign provides a comparable implementation, tweaking all those details.

TeXmacs claims to have implemented microtypography as well (https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/news.en.html, as I am reading it, in the opening paragraph on version 2.1)

It depends what you're typesetting—if you're using letter/A4 paper with 1" margins, then you're unlikely to notice any difference; but if you're using narrow columns, then it will vastly reduce the number of paragraphs with ugly huge spaces between words. Margin kerning is the other big feature, but you probably won't notice that unless you're fairly picky.

I’m going to have to disagree with you there. The compile times are long, the error messages are worse than useless, and tikz diagrams are almost always unreadable messes.

Large swathes of mathematics, computer science, and physics involve notations and diagrams that are genuinely hard to typeset, and incredibly repetitive and hard to read if you don’t make heavy use of the macro system. Integrating some actual programming features could be a game changer.

> Integrating some actual programming features could be a game changer.

LuaTeX already lets you embed Lua code and it is really good.

However, I do agree some usability improvements are needed.

Have you ever looked at a category theory or differential geometry paper? It just doesn’t feel like you appreciate what people are up against.

Look at this thing: https://images.app.goo.gl/4WHN9Pqupxkk8Z3j7

And that’s before you get into stuff like categories of spans, etc.

Typst does already support some microtype fetures out of the box and more are coming: https://github.com/typst/typst/pull/6161

I'd also not overemphasize the significance of microtype features. They might help with narrow columns but on wider columnds the difference is very small and most people will never notice them at all.