Hans :
never seen them [thin spaces] in dutch ... Example from a book published in Haarlem, 1838, “Gedichten van Nicolaas Beets” — you will even see thin spaces before commas, like in France in the 17th-18th century. https://books.google.fr/books? id=s1BUAAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
i think not so much lazyness but side effect of going digital ... i bet that these spaces were also (ab)used to justify lines (cheat a bit) i.e. manual injection of some lead blobs : The first books where I saw all thin spaces disappear were printed in the USA in the 20th century, after 1910 but certainly before 1960, so before digital publishing, but I am no specialist of type history.
keep in mind that we use values that were specified by french users ... however, as usual with language specific features, these can differ per user I guess that they unfortunately were no typographers. It is true that there are at least two different schools on this subject. I will explain all that when I have a bit more time.
Greetings Thomas Savary 1 le Grand-Plessis F-85340 L’Île-d’Olonne Tél. 06 22 82 61 34 https://compo85.fr/ mercredi 15 janvier 2020, à 10:15:45 CET, Hans Hagen a écrit :
On 1/14/2020 11:25 PM, Thomas Savary wrote:
Hello, dear list !
Joseph :
With LMTX (MkIV is fine) characterspacing (I use frenchpunctuation)
is not
applied sometimes (ie no spacing before colon for example) in some
parts of
Character-spacing for French punctuation marks is incorrect in MkIV anyway : the “thin” spaces are much too wide. I will write more about it when I have more time. I have just begun to lean ConTeXt. For the time being, I don’t use its automatic spacing for French punctuation, but real Unicode spaces such as U+202F (non breakable thin space, about 0.125 em, depending on the font).
keep in mind that we use values that were specified by french users ... however, as usual with language specific features, these can differ per user
anyway, it's configureable
By the way, thin spaces are not specific to French typography, historically speaking, since they seem to have been used everywhere in Europe for centuries — at least in England, Belgium, Germany and Italy (probably in the Netherlands too, I will check). In France and sometimes in England, thin spaces were often used before commas as well. I wonder why most countries stopped using them. Out of laziness ? :-)
never seen them in dutch ... i think not so much lazyness but side effect of going digital ... i bet that these spaces were also (ab)used to justify lines (cheat a bit) i.e. manual injection of some lead blob
Hans
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