[cl-typesetting-devel] Should justification change inter-letterspacing?

[Peter Heslin]

It turns out that I was somewhat mistaken when I wrote this:

> Well, it's not that text in the margin is a good outcome, it's that
> for many people, letter-spacing text is not an acceptable way to solve
> the problem.  Many good books on typographical design, such as
> Bringhurst's _The Elements of Typographical Style_, recommend strongly
> against ever, ever letter-spacing lower-case text.  Goudy once
> famously compared the practice to stealing sheep.

I have just read in comp.text.tex:

  Bringhurst in ``The Elements of Typographic Style'' (Version 3.0)
  mentions that the software he used for setting Elements (InDesign,
  no version number given):

    ``...has been permitted to vary the intercharacter spacing by \pm
    3% and to adjust the width of individual glyphs by \pm 2%.'' (pg
    192)

I have the second edition of Bringhurst's book, not the third; the
second edition says nothing about this.  So I guess the moral is that
a very, very small amount of letter-spacing is allowable if it makes a
better paragraph -- small enough that it is not noticeable.  But I
still think that the cl-typesetting default allows a bit too much.

In the course of this discussion it transpired that pdftex has these
capabilities also.

-- 
Peter Heslin (http://www.dur.ac.uk/p.j.heslin)