[cl-typesetting-devel] Should justification changeinter-letterspacing?

[Marc Battyani]

"Peter Heslin" <pj at heslin.eclipse.co.uk> wrote:

> 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.

Well I think it's a good thing for some pathological cases like very narrow 
text columns for instance.
One thing I also wanted to do is to apply a small amount of compression to 
avoid moving a word (or parts of a word) on the next line if only a small 
amount of x space is missing. Of course this should be done in correlation 
with the lines around that one.

Marc