I am setting some text from Geoffrey Dowding's /Finer Points in the 
Spacing and Arrangement of Type/. I am trying to set it using his 
recommendations. For those not familiar with his book, the key point is 
that he promotes extremely tight spacing to achieve a uniform density 
across the page in the belief that this leads to a pleasing presentation 
and improved readability.

Among his recommendations is that an opening single quote together with 
the space preceding it should take up no more space than a normal word 
space, and similarly following a closing single quote; that the space 
after some punctuation be minimized (some of his commas appear to have 
perhaps just a hairspace, following them); that the space between 
punctuation and letters be adjusted according to the shape of the 
letter; and that 'and' be replaced by '&' as necessary to improve word 
spacing. While this last is probably beyond the scope of ConTeXt, I am 
hoping that the first few might be managed through 
\definecharacterspacing, \setupcharacterspacing, and \setcharacterspacing.

Alas, I have found no documentation on this set of commands, and what I 
see in the source is opaque.

If you have pointers to the details of these commands, or other 
suggestions for such typographic exercises, please let me know.

-- 
Rik Kabel