Hans :
> never seen them [thin spaces] in dutch ... 
Example from a book published in Haarlem, 1838, “Gedichten van Nicolaas Beets” 
— you will even see thin spaces before commas, like in France in the 17th-18th 
century.
https://books.google.fr/books?
id=s1BUAAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

> i think not so much lazyness but side
> effect of going digital ... i bet that these spaces were also (ab)used
> to justify lines (cheat a bit) i.e. manual injection of some lead blobs :
The first books where I saw all thin spaces disappear were printed in the USA in 
the 20th century, after 1910 but certainly before 1960, so before digital 
publishing, but I am no specialist of type history.

> keep in mind that we use values that were specified by french users ...
> however, as usual with language specific features, these can differ per
> user
I guess that they unfortunately were no typographers. It is true that there 
are at least two different schools on this subject. I will explain all that 
when I have a bit more time.

Greetings

Thomas Savary
1 le Grand-Plessis
F-85340 L’Île-d’Olonne
Tél. 06 22 82 61 34
https://compo85.fr/


mercredi 15 janvier 2020, à 10:15:45 CET, Hans Hagen a écrit :
> On 1/14/2020 11:25 PM, Thomas Savary wrote:
> > Hello, dear list !
> > 
> > Joseph :
> >  > With LMTX (MkIV is fine) characterspacing (I use frenchpunctuation)
> > 
> > is not
> > 
> >  > applied sometimes (ie no spacing before colon for example) in some
> > 
> > parts of
> > 
> > Character-spacing for French punctuation marks is incorrect in MkIV
> > anyway : the “thin” spaces are much too wide. I will write more about it
> > when I have more time. I have just begun to lean ConTeXt. For the time
> > being, I don’t use its automatic spacing for French punctuation, but
> > real Unicode spaces such as U+202F (non breakable thin space, about
> > 0.125 em, depending on the font).
> 
> keep in mind that we use values that were specified by french users ...
> however, as usual with language specific features, these can differ per
> user
> 
> anyway, it's configureable
> 
> > By the way, thin spaces are not specific to French typography,
> > historically speaking, since they seem to have been used everywhere in
> > Europe for centuries — at least in England, Belgium, Germany and Italy
> > (probably in the Netherlands too, I will check). In France and sometimes
> > in England, thin spaces were often used before commas as well. I wonder
> > why most countries stopped using them. Out of laziness ? :-)
> 
> never seen them in dutch ... i think not so much lazyness but side
> effect of going digital ... i bet that these spaces were also (ab)used
> to justify lines (cheat a bit) i.e. manual injection of some lead blob
> 
> Hans
> 
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