Follow-up Comment #14, bug #54101 (project groff): [comment #12 comment #12:] > The question I have is, should extra space be distributed in > keeping with the relative proportion of additional > intersentence space to interword space? > > That's more of a typography question than a code question. > One of us can take it to the list, I reckon.
Indeed, the answer isn't clear. According to this ranting but well-documented blog post <http://web.archive.org/web/20171217060354/http://www.heracliteanriver.com/?p=324>, professional typography stopped using extra sentence spacing between the 1920s and the 1950s, breaking with two centuries of nearly universal typographic practice. Ideally, groff would adjust sentence spaces in line with that historical practice, but finding someone familiar with such details may require casting the net wider than the groff email list. This blog post states, "the aesthetics of how to handle the various width spaces... had complex rules that can be found in many of the manuals cited above," a vagueness that makes sense given that the question of adjusting is beyond its scope. But it does quote a passage from the 1906 Chicago Manual of Style with some Byzantine (and, to my modern eyes, not entirely comprehensible) rules for adjusting a line, wherein space is added or removed depending on the shapes of the adjacent characters, among other considerations. This is probably not only inadvisable in modern groff (it concerns a typesetting paradigm where other marks of punctuation also got something other than a standard word space after them), but not even possible, as I don't think groff has any awareness of letter shapes (else why would user intervention be required to avoid a collision between an italic f and a roman end parenthesis?). But it seems to me that groff's current system is not ideal. Your example from comment #4 probably illustrates this best, showing that with large adjustments, spaces between words and those between sentences become nigh indistinguishable, surely not the desired outcome when the user has asked for sentence spaces to be two to four times the width of word spaces. _______________________________________________________ Reply to this item at: <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?54101> _______________________________________________ Message sent via Savannah https://savannah.gnu.org/
