richard@gryphon.CTS.COM (Richard Sexton) (06/02/88)
How big should a space be ?
--
The SLA of SNA.
richard@gryphon.CTS.COM rutgers!marque!gryphon!richardlee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Greg Lee) (06/02/88)
From article <4292@gryphon.CTS.COM>, by richard@gryphon.CTS.COM (Richard Sexton): " How big should a space be ? Just big enough to make it appear that things of the same sort are separated equally. Greg, lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu
gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ) (06/03/88)
In article <4292@gryphon.CTS.COM> richard@gryphon.CTS.COM (Richard Sexton) writes: >How big should a space be ? That depends on the alignment requirements for the text being typeset and often varies from line to line. For unaligned text you should probably use an en-space between words, but it depends on the font.
guido@cwi.nl (Guido van Rossum) (06/03/88)
> How big should a space be ?
I'm amazed at the number of people who anser this question without even
(apparently) pondering the context. The kind of discussion that could
follow (I'm sure nobody knows the right answer :-) depends on whether
you are designing a font, using a wordprocessor, designing a formatting
algorithm...
Basically, the font designer defines how wide a space for a given font
should be (after all, it is a character in the font!). With good fonts
there should also be guidelines for the minimum and maximum spaces to
use when stretching or shrinking a line to get the right amrgin
straight. TeX allows certain spaces to stretch slightly more (between
sentences, or after a comma, for instance). These rules should be used
by "the rest of the world". Now if you're designing a font, this
doesn't answer your question.
Like almost every other question a font designer could ask (and should
try to answer for herself!), the answer lies in "does it look good?"
Here you obviously cannot expect an answer from the net.
--
Guido van Rossum, Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), Amsterdam
guido@piring.cwi.nl or mcvax!piring!guido or guido%piring.cwi.nl@uunet.uu.net