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Re: [Groff] space width
From: |
Peter Schaffter |
Subject: |
Re: [Groff] space width |
Date: |
Fri, 31 Jan 2014 20:06:11 -0500 |
User-agent: |
Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15) |
On Wed, Jan 29, 2014, Werner Lemberg wrote:
> Letter-spacing is bad in general.
I find this statement a bit too broad, especially in the context of
groff, whose only means of justifying lines presently is through
the expansion of wordspace, often with ghastly results. Have a
look at the first page of pdf output of typesetting.mom in the mom
examples files. Admittedly, the example given shows letterspacing
used in a rag context, but it's very hard not to agree that the
"massaged" passage using very small amounts of letterspacing
(expanded and reduced) is typographically superior to the unmassaged
version.
> A better solution is font expansion, as implemented e.g. in
> pdflatex. Unfortunately, MM fonts have been abandoned...
In which case, one has to ask: is justification through wordspacing
alone, as is the case with groff now, a superior solution to
implementing word-and letter-spacing? Not that I don't want to
agree with you, but the realities of groff currently, plus the
absence of Multiple Master fonts, make finding alternative solutions
a must, hence my suggestion of incorporating letterspacing. Not a
perfect solution, but one that can be implemented and that is, to my
eye, superior to what we have now.
> Given today's memory abundance and the high velocity of CPUs, the
> ideal route would be to implement a document-wide algorithm for
> typesetting a document (in contrast to TeX's page-wide approach).
Completely agree. The Holy Grail of typesetting. Do you think it
will ever come to be?
--
Peter Schaffter
http://www.schaffter.ca
- Re: [Groff] space width, (continued)
Re: [Groff] space width, Tadziu Hoffmann, 2014/01/27