Re: too small inter-word spacing

[j . van den hoff]

Jeff Kingston <jeff <at> it.usyd.edu.au> writes:

> 
> > Yes, I have a similar impression: Spacing for English is ok, but
> > for German (also known for its long words) it is often too tight.
> 
> I think this mail of Michael's puts us over a threshold where it
> would seem to be worthwhile to offer users some means of
> controlling the tightness of paragraph layout.  The next
> question is, what?  The optimum paragraph breaker utilizes
> a number of obscure constants.  I would very much prefer to
> boil these down into just one number that the user can set;
> but on the other hand, I can see at least two dimensions:
> pure tightness/looseness, and tendency to hyphenate or not.
> 
> I can't see myself doing anything for the impending release,
> but I would welcome comments and suggestions.  Does anyone
> know of any other typesetting system with such a feature?
> 
> Jeff
> 
> 

just back in office, only now reading the above:

1. thanks's to michael for independent confirmation of the spacing problem. as 
he correctly stated, one might be able to fight incidences to some extent one-
by-one with hyphenation hints but this is not desirable, I'd say, since that's 
back to manual typesetting. I myself have in the meantime encountered quite a 
number of similar incidences. in the really extreme cases it's as in michael's
example (visual merging of neighbouring words). but on closer examination there 
are lots more of 'near merges' where the spacing simply is unacceptably/
unsensibly tight.

2. I'm very glad for jeff's assessment that the issue now calls for some action.
concerning his question, how to give the user some means of intervening: I 
would be glad if such a strategy could be implemented as a last resort, _if_ 
the defaults used by lout for the "obscure constants" are not altered to solve 
the problem. my fiddling around with them a bit (despite their rather opaque 
meaning...) seems to indicate that one _can_ alter one or two of them in a way 
that improves overall behaviour significantly (a bit looser, a bit more 
hyphenation -- and this not in each and every line but in fact mostly affecting 
lines where the spacing is actually too tight now). so one naive idea might be 
to identify the most relevant of the 14(?) constants, let the user provide a 
single number >=1 which scales/offsets all relevant constants simultaneously. 
my "experiments" hint essentially on MAX_SHRINK as the
parameter of greatest leverage wrt spacing (e.g. increasing(!) it 8-fold(!) 
yields much better spacing in my view). another solution might actually be to 
really make _all_ constants user visible/settable despite their "obscureness" 
and provide some guidance in the manual what they mean and what to try if 
spacing should be increased. this, after all, would give maximum flexibility.

but I can only reiterate what I've said earlier: louts relatives (TeX, troff) 
have managed to provide adequate/good spacing without any need for user 
intervention. it should be possible to achieve this in lout, too. it would be 
great if this could be done.

joerg