[texhax] Ref. Man. Bausum [was tabbing]

[Karl Berry]

    Till now I had thought that I never would be
    able to learn anything from the web source.

Personally, when I read through the typeset tex/mf.web years ago, I just
skimmed the code at a very high level, but read Knuth's commentary
carefully, as if I were reading a book.  (Not worrying about all the
parts I couldn't immediately follow, like all the serious math in
mf.web.)  Which, um, I was :).  I think your background is more than
enough to do that.  And if you like the TeXbook, you'd probably enjoy it.

    too little about implicit kerns to understand all that).

Well, Knuth explains it right there.  Implicit kerns aren't allowable
line breaks, aren't discardable items, etc.  I guess \nobreak\kern<dimen>
is the closest you could come at the TeX level, but of course it's not
quite the same.

Happy reading,
karl