Re: too small inter-word spacing

[Jeff Kingston]

Joerg van den Hoff <address@hidden> wrote:
> I ran into a problem with too tight word spacing.

I was able to reproduce your output here.  I agree it looks very
tight.  Whether it is worse than the alternatives, however, is a
matter of opinion.  The solution is to follow Knuth's advice and
slightly rewrite the paragraph.  This would be a burden if it
happened frequently, but it doesn't.

> why does a minor modification of line length lead to completely
> different line breaks (e.g., why is no hyphenation used

Lout is producing what, in its opinion, is an optimal paragraph
break.  It optimizes over the entire paragraph, not one line at
at time.  It is in the nature of optimizing paragraph breaking
that a slight change to the paragraph or its available width
can produce a large shift in the optimum break.

> is the tight spacing a general property of `lout' which has
> been designed to work mainly with the standard font family?

No.

> I'm especially interested to learn, whether there is some way
> to increase inter-word spacing a bit globally

I suggest you wait a while until you have a good picture of the
overall behaviour of paragraph breaking across your entire
document.  Then, if you still think that the paragraph breaking
is generally too tight, you can try editing file

    lout.lib/font/Pa-Rm

to change the WX entry on the line defining the size of the
space character from its current value to something larger.

Jeff