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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