On 11/18/13, Tadziu Hoffmann <[email protected]> wrote: > In the original troff (according to the Troff User's Manual) > a space was nominally 1/3 em and a thinspace was 1/6 em, > thus half a normal space. In groff's TR font, a space > is nominally 1/4 em, but a thinspace is still only 1/6 em. > Isn't that strange?
I thought of this two-month-old post when I found http://www.heracliteanriver.com/?p=324, a lengthy article that exhaustively documents that until the early to mid 20th century, standard typesetting practice was to put more space between sentences than between words. After refuting the arguments of those who dispute that basic fact, the author goes on to speak of the possible reasons that the sentence space has typically come to be the same as the word space over the course of the past century: Here, there seems to be no direct historical account, but there are two theories often given. First, there is the obvious benefit to production cost that comes with reduced spacing. Less whitespace means less paper, which means fewer pages, which means reduced costs. Margins became smaller around this time, and standard interword spaces often went from about 1/3 em to 1/4 em. Is it not surprising that the wide gaps [between] sentences would have to go as well? So it seems the original troff's interword space followed historical typesetting practice, while groff's narrower space follows a more modern typical practice.
