Reducing inter-character spacing?

Reducing inter-character spacing?

[Mari Voipio]

Hello,

here comes yet another "I could do this in Word but can't figure it
out how ConTeXt does it" font-related question:

How can I reduces inter-character spacing in a font?
I've found out that the spacing can be temporarily expanded by
\stretched{}, but what's the opposite and how to control it? And I
want to do it all over one product in my project, but on the other
hand I don't need to reset it for any individual words or anything.

(I assume that if the overall inter-character spacing is reduced,
inter-word spacing will follow, but if not, I need to be able to
reduce that, too.)


I guess it isn't easily available because I'm not really supposed to
be cramping the nicely designed fonts, especially not my nice new
shiny Lucida OT - but I'm trying to create something in the style of
past centuries when the style and requirements were different from
today's.
I've decided to use ConTeXt just because it should allow me to produce
both the period-looking-but-illegible and
nicely-typeset-modern-but-actually-usable versions of the same
project. :-)


TIA,

Mari
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Re: Reducing inter-character spacing?

[Marco]

On 2012-04-24 Mari Voipio <mari.voipio@iki.fi> wrote:

> How can I reduces inter-character spacing in a font?

\definecharacterkerning [narrow] [factor=-.1]
\definecharacterkerning [wide]   [factor=.2]

\starttext

\setcharacterkerning [narrow]
\input knuth

\setcharacterkerning [wide]
\input knuth

\setcharacterkerning [reset]
\input knuth

\stoptext

Watch out, this mechanism breaks ligatures.

Marco


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Re: Reducing inter-character spacing?

[Mari Voipio]

On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 18:20, Marco <netuse@lavabit.com> wrote:
> \definecharacterkerning [narrow] [factor=-.1]
>
> \starttext
>
> \setcharacterkerning [narrow]
> \input knuth
>
> \stoptext

This did the trick - and -.1 was just enough to dense the text up but
not into total mess (-.2 was definitely Far Too Much).


> Watch out, this mechanism breaks ligatures.

Doesn't matter in this case, I'm not that good at them when doing this
by hand (involves ink, steel nib and too many splotches). My kerning
still sucks big time in hand calligraphy, ConTeXt does it better.  :-D
Besides, if I ever want to do this really properly, I'll have to
define my own ligatures anyway, they had all kinds of weird
abbreviations which depend on whether you write English, Latin or
Swedish... Won't happen this round, the contents won't be in fully
period style either, just in the "inspired by" range. Maybe for
September.



Thank you, this admirably solved that little problem!


Mari
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