Re: too small inter-word spacing

[Joerg van den Hoff]

On Sep 03 2008 (Wed,  8:15), Jeff Kingston wrote:
> Joerg van den Hoff <address@hidden> wrote:

thanks for taking the time

> > I ran into a problem with too tight word spacing.
> 
> I was able to reproduce your output here.  I agree it looks very

good. at least it's not only some obscure "local" phenomenon.

> tight.  Whether it is worse than the alternatives, however, is a
> matter of opinion.  The solution is to follow Knuth's advice and

mmh. sure typography is not exact science: what looks "good" is to
some extent a matter of taste. but in the present case (with Palatino at
least) it really looks rather bad. although you should be 
biased toward lout ;-), do you
really think the first line of the example looks right? 


> slightly rewrite the paragraph.  This would be a burden if it
> happened frequently, but it doesn't.

when you start looking for it, you notice sporadic incidences of similar
tight spacing (not invariant under font change...).
I have done now a bit more of a systematic comparison of `groff' and
loutoutput using identical fonts and pointsizes: without exception
spacing is much tighter in `lout'. on average this might be a matter of
taste (whether the tighter spacing is better), although it sure seems at
least unusually tight compared to `groff' and `TeX', too (although I did
not test this systematically: at least some TeX document (yes, in CMR)
lying around here shows significant  wider inter-word spacing). but in
places words at moderate reading distance nearly merge. or, occasionally,
a full stop at end of sentence is followed by the first letter of 
the next sentence nearly without any intervening space.

> 
> > why does a minor modification of line length lead to completely
> > different line breaks (e.g., why is no hyphenation used
> 
> Lout is producing what, in its opinion, is an optimal paragraph
> break.  It optimizes over the entire paragraph, not one line at
> at time.  It is in the nature of optimizing paragraph breaking
> that a slight change to the paragraph or its available width
> can produce a large shift in the optimum break.

I forgot this global strategy of TeX and lout (I believe groff still
procedes line-by-line). in any way I understand that at some point
always a threshold will be tripped (this would happen with groff, too)
but why is hyphenation not used? I'm not a native speaker of course, so
I'm not sure whether in my example `manual' is "unbreakable".

> 
> > is the tight spacing a general property of `lout' which has
> > been designed to work mainly with the standard font family?
> 
> No.
> 
> > I'm especially interested to learn, whether there is some way
> > to increase inter-word spacing a bit globally
> 
> I suggest you wait a while until you have a good picture of the
> overall behaviour of paragraph breaking across your entire
> document.  Then, if you still think that the paragraph breaking

doing this right now...

> is generally too tight, you can try editing file
> 
>     lout.lib/font/Pa-Rm
> 
> to change the WX entry on the line defining the size of the
> space character from its current value to something larger.

not sure whether I should really mess with the font metrics file but
maybe I just test it out.  now, the line you mentioned reads

 C 32 ; WX 250 ; N space ; B 0 0 0 0 ;

before starting to search for it in the net:
would you mind a short hint on the meaning of the last 4 numbers, which
are the size specification I guess? if so what does the above default
mean: a zero size of the space? and what are the units, i.e. how would
a slight increase in space size be accomplished?

thanks again,

joerg
> 
> Jeff