Re: Inter-letter spacing

[info]

Hi Mark,

thanks,

> Look in the Experts Guide section 3.2, and in particular Figure 3.2 on
> lout's "gap modes". The one you want is o (overstrike). For example:
> 
>     An O with a dot in it:~{O |0co @CDot} untested!
> 
> The 0c part is a length (0 centimetres) and the o is overstrike.
 
was exactly what I needed (although I could not get the point into the O, but 
that's a
different point).

I read through some pages of the expert guide and was wondering if there is a
possibility to do some arithmetics with the provided units of Lout? For example,
if I want to compress a word using this overstrike method, it would be nice if
I can use the width of the preceeding character for a "variable" kind of
overlapping. There is one unit of measurement "w" for the width of the
following character but I couldn't figure out how to generate a good looking
narrow, overlapping word without quite tedious manual adjustments.

By the way, for my need of expanded letters, a more convenient way without
repetition of the concatenation symbols is using @Space:
7p @Space {i n  t h e  H o u s e}
equals:
{i |7pe n |7pe  |7pe t |7pe h |7pe e |7pe  |7pe H |7pe o |7pe u |7pe s |7pe e}

-Martin