Reducing inter-character spacing?
Hello, here comes yet another "I could do this in Word but can't figure it out how ConTeXt does it" font-related question: How can I reduces inter-character spacing in a font? I've found out that the spacing can be temporarily expanded by \stretched{}, but what's the opposite and how to control it? And I want to do it all over one product in my project, but on the other hand I don't need to reset it for any individual words or anything. (I assume that if the overall inter-character spacing is reduced, inter-word spacing will follow, but if not, I need to be able to reduce that, too.) I guess it isn't easily available because I'm not really supposed to be cramping the nicely designed fonts, especially not my nice new shiny Lucida OT - but I'm trying to create something in the style of past centuries when the style and requirements were different from today's. I've decided to use ConTeXt just because it should allow me to produce both the period-looking-but-illegible and nicely-typeset-modern-but-actually-usable versions of the same project. :-) TIA, Mari
On 2012-04-24 Mari Voipio
How can I reduces inter-character spacing in a font?
\definecharacterkerning [narrow] [factor=-.1] \definecharacterkerning [wide] [factor=.2] \starttext \setcharacterkerning [narrow] \input knuth \setcharacterkerning [wide] \input knuth \setcharacterkerning [reset] \input knuth \stoptext Watch out, this mechanism breaks ligatures. Marco
On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 18:20, Marco
\definecharacterkerning [narrow] [factor=-.1]
\starttext
\setcharacterkerning [narrow] \input knuth
\stoptext
This did the trick - and -.1 was just enough to dense the text up but not into total mess (-.2 was definitely Far Too Much).
Watch out, this mechanism breaks ligatures.
Doesn't matter in this case, I'm not that good at them when doing this by hand (involves ink, steel nib and too many splotches). My kerning still sucks big time in hand calligraphy, ConTeXt does it better. :-D Besides, if I ever want to do this really properly, I'll have to define my own ligatures anyway, they had all kinds of weird abbreviations which depend on whether you write English, Latin or Swedish... Won't happen this round, the contents won't be in fully period style either, just in the "inspired by" range. Maybe for September. Thank you, this admirably solved that little problem! Mari
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Marco
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Mari Voipio