On 5/29/2014 8:15 PM, Rik Kabel wrote:
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.
you can mess with sfcodes: \starttext \input tufte \sfcode`\.100 \sfcode`\,100 \sfcode`\?100 \sfcode`\!100 \sfcode`\:100 \sfcode`\;100 \input tufte \dostepwiserecurse{`a}{`z}{1}{\sfcode#1=100\relax} \input tufte \dostepwiserecurse{"0}{"FFFF}{1}{\sfcode#1=100\relax} \input tufte \stoptext I'm pretty sure I would not read books typeset that way. replacing and by & can be done too but that would look even worse (for consistency one should then replace 'or' by | and even more can be saved by going sms: "wandering" becomes "w&ndering", and "according" becomes "acc|rding" plus the usual messing with digits probably, omitting all vowels would work out too for reader who like that compact typesetting Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | voip: 087 875 68 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------