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