Re: minimum interword spacing for a whole document?

[Mark Summerfield]

On 2007-08-17, Jeff Kingston wrote:
> The normal interword spacing is the width of a space character
> in the font.  One option would be to increase the width of a
> space in the font metric file for your body text font.  Another
> would be to hack source file z14.c by changing the line
>
>     #define   SQRT_TIGHT_BAD      128
>
> to, say,
>
>     #define   SQRT_TIGHT_BAD      256
>
> to increase the penalty for tight lines.  Ignore the
> "#define TIGHT_BAD" line, TIGHT_BAD is no longer used.
> In z14.c there is also
>
>     #define MAX_SHRINK        4
>
> which is saying that Lout is willing to reduce the width of a space
> to a minimum of 1 - 1/4 of its usual value (although this will of
> course attract a large penalty).  You could increase this to 5 or 6
> and see what happens.  It's all a balancing act, however, so other
> things might come out looking worse.  Your publisher might start
> complaining about excessive hyphenation or loose lines.  You have to
> fiddle around, which is what I did when setting these numbers long ago.

OK.

This should really be a @Break option (e.g., 0.4s) so that one can fix
offending paragraphs!

> Jeff
>
> ps I hope your publisher is proof-reading hard copy.  Inter-word
> spaces that look too small on screen often look OK on paper,
> owing to the tendency of screen previewers to move the positions
> of characters to the nearest whole pixel offset.

Yes, they send a paper printout to the proof reader. (Then they send me
back the marked up pages as a PDF that they've scanned.)

Thanks.

PS Can't upgrade to 3.36 'til after the final PDF is accepted (in a week
or two; will use it for the next one though:-)

-- 
Mark Summerfield, Qtrac Ltd., www.qtrac.eu