Re: Character and word spacing

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

On 5/29/2014 8:15 PM, Rik Kabel wrote:
> 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.

you can mess with sfcodes:

\starttext

\input tufte

\sfcode`\.100 \sfcode`\,100
\sfcode`\?100 \sfcode`\!100
\sfcode`\:100 \sfcode`\;100

\input tufte

\dostepwiserecurse{`a}{`z}{1}{\sfcode#1=100\relax}

\input tufte

\dostepwiserecurse{"0}{"FFFF}{1}{\sfcode#1=100\relax}

\input tufte

\stoptext

I'm pretty sure I would not read books typeset that way.

replacing and by & can be done too but that would look even worse (for 
consistency one should then replace 'or' by | and even more can be saved 
by going sms: "wandering" becomes "w&ndering", and "according" becomes 
"acc|rding" plus the usual messing with digits

probably, omitting all vowels would work out too for reader who like 
that compact typesetting

Hans


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