[NTG-context] characterspacing not always working in LMTX

[Hans Hagen]

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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