I am setting some text from Geoffrey Dowding's /Finer Points in the
Spacing and Arrangement of Type/. I am trying to set it using his
recommendations. For those not familiar with his book, the key point is
that he promotes extremely tight spacing to achieve a uniform density
across the page in the belief that this leads to a pleasing presentation
and improved readability.
Among his recommendations is that an opening single quote together with
the space preceding it should take up no more space than a normal word
space, and similarly following a closing single quote; that the space
after some punctuation be minimized (some of his commas appear to have
perhaps just a hairspace, following them); that the space between
punctuation and letters be adjusted according to the shape of the
letter; and that 'and' be replaced by '&' as necessary to improve word
spacing. While this last is probably beyond the scope of ConTeXt, I am
hoping that the first few might be managed through
\definecharacterspacing, \setupcharacterspacing, and \setcharacterspacing.
Alas, I have found no documentation on this set of commands, and what I
see in the source is opaque.
If you have pointers to the details of these commands, or other
suggestions for such typographic exercises, please let me know.
--
Rik Kabel