too small inter-word spacing

[Joerg van den Hoff]

hello,

apologies in advance if it's trivial (still a newbie to lout):

I ran into a problem with too tight word spacing. specifically,
I've typeset some text (tentative collection of my private lout-memos) 
using this settings in a local copy of the `book' setup file:

    ...
    @InitialFont        { Palatino Base 12p     } # initial font
   ...

page size and margins are initally kept at their defaults (A4, 2.5c). With
this setting I encountered the problem described below. In order to give
a self-contained small example, I copied the concerned paragraph from
the "book" document to a standard document and generated this file:

#-------------------------------------
@Include {doc.setup}
@Doc @Text @Begin
@LP
For more complicated arrangements several options exist for positioning.
Cf. the manual for the details. One example follows which is already
a bit of a nuisance to generate --- really a bit more cumbersome than
with @F{pic}.
@End @Text
#-------------------------------------

where `doc.setup' is a local copy of the setup file which is edited
w.r.t. address@hidden' the same way I did originally in the `book.setup'.
actually, in order to reproduce the phenomenon encountered in the
original "book" file, I had also to reduce all PageMargins from 2.5c to
2.47c. this is a separate observation (same input with same font,
fontsize, margins etc.) typeset differently in standard "doc" and "book")
which I list only for completeness although it's a bit confusing.

now to my main problem:

when this document is typeset (to reiterate: in the "book" this occurs
with all settings except font on their defaults, in the "doc" all
margins are reduced to 2.47c in addition), it is formatted approx like
this (shell comments not part of output):

#======================================================
For more complicated arrangements several options exist for positioning.Cf.the 
manual 
for the details. One example follows which is already a bit of a nuisance to 
generate --- 
really a bit more cumbersome than with pic.
#======================================================

which is meant to show that especially in the first line inter-word spacing
is _extremely_ squeezed and virtually non-existent between
`positioning.', `Cf.', and the following `the'. lout here puts everything
up to and including `manual' on the first output line without
hypenation. 

if I compare this to `groff' output using the same input text (except, of
course, inserting the correct `LP', em-dash and fixed width font definition), 
font and
pagesize and margins, I notice that groff formats the same text as:

#======================================================
For more complicated arrangements several options exist for positioning. Cf. the
manual for the details. One example follows which is already a bit of a 
nuisance to 
generate --- really a bit more cumbersome than with pic.
#======================================================

i.e. the word `manual', e.g., is already shifted to the next line. as a result 
the
output of `groff' looks perfectly OK and readable whereas the `lout'
output is (in my view) unreasonably squeezed to the point where some words 
virtually
merge. moreover, if I change the pagemargins from 2.47c to 1i, `groff'
maintains it's line breaks (adjusting the spacing a bit), whereas `lout'
now decides to break lines at the same points as `groff' does.

using `Times Base 12p', `lout' still chooses to typeset with rather
small inter-word spacing, but the result is at least acceptable (but
still inferior to `groff' I'd say). with `Palatino'
it is'nt acceptable, at least in places.

I would be glad if someone could shed some light on this situation. 

some questions are: 

why does a minor modification of line length lead to completely different
line breaks (e.g., why is no hyphenation used instead of shifting the
line break from before `manual' to after `manual' (or is hyphenation of`manual' 
not
permissible?)? 

why is the inter-word spacing reduced so much with Palatino in my example?
it seems that `groff's decision to put  `manual' on the next line 
yields much more reasonable results. I'm not talking about
"microtypography" here. the lout output in this example really does not
look right.

is the tight spacing a general property of `lout' which has been
designed to work mainly with the standard font family?

I'm especially interested to learn, whether there is some way to increase
inter-word spacing a bit globally (optimally via some settings in the setup 
files
or at compile time).


thanks in advance,

joerg

PS: please send me a CC, since
I'm only described to the mailing list digest (which makes answering a bit
tedious for me...)