Re: [NTG-context] Character and word spacing
On 5/31/2014 4:14 PM, Rik Kabel wrote:
My issue with Dowding (and with Gill) is that they suggest that the compositor
has an obligation to change the author's text, without consultation and
agreement, in order to meet his concept of better page makeup. Dowding's
sensitivity to the appearance of the page, on the other hand, is sadly missing
from much of book publishing today.
Long ago I have been thinking of improving some \oneof {bad}
{suboptimal} paragraphs by applying 'alternative' words, i.e. one could
\optional {for instance} write like this.
Gross manipulation of the space factors is probably too crude to accomplish much
in implementing the style Dowding promotes, although the tightness in the second
tufte from your example (modifying the punctuation) may be a starting point.
With XeTeX, one can use \interchartoks to handle general (non-font-specific)
kerning between punctuation and certain letter shapes (sloped left or right,
ascender, descender, ...) beyond what any particular font's kerning tables
provide. I see nothing in MKIV that provides this, and thought that perhaps
\definecharacterspacing might fill the role. Hence the original question in this
thread.
you can play with (subtle) expansion (hz) and specific stretch vectors
.. imo kerning other than what the font designer has in mind is normally
a bad idea; another option is to use a font with different glyphs for
the same character but I don't know of such fonts
Hans
-
Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
tel: 038 477 53 69 | voip: 087 875 68 74 | www.pragma-ade.com
| www.pragma-pod.nl
-
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[NTG-context] Character and word spacing
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. -- Rik Kabel ___ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki! maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net archive : http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/ wiki : http://contextgarden.net ___
Re: [NTG-context] Character and word spacing
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}{}{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 wndering, 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
-
Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
tel: 038 477 53 69 | voip: 087 875 68 74 | www.pragma-ade.com
| www.pragma-pod.nl
-
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