\emph command: I was under the impression that you need to still use the \/ command afterward to do an italic correction: it turns out that you do not need to.
I verified this using the wonderul
\showbox command in LaTeX: this spits out the contents of a box, including all characters and kerns.
Note: in order to use this command in LaTeX, you need to reset the
\showboxdepth and \showboxbreadth counters, which are reset for some reason. This can be done like so:
\showboxdepth=100
\showboxbreadth=100
Thanks to Oleg for this tip.
After I did this, I threw the following code in a LaTeX document (it has to be inside of a document, not the preamble, otherwise it won't load the fonts properly):
\setbox122=\hbox{{\it i}i}
\showbox122
\setbox123=\hbox{\emph{i}i}
\showbox123
Then, checking the log file gave me:
> \box122=
\hbox(6.67859+0.0)x5.84444
.\OT1/cmr/m/it/10 i
.\OT1/cmr/m/n/10 i
! OK.
l.7 \showbox122
?
> \box123=
\hbox(6.67859+0.0)x6.86339
.\OT1/cmr/m/it/10 i
.\kern 1.01895
.\OT1/cmr/m/n/10 i
! OK.
l.9 \showbox123
So, the
\emph command automatically puts in the \/ as necessary. (I verified that it doesn't seem to insert this when it isn't needed.)
