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.

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Rik Kabel