Re: too small inter-word spacing

[Joerg van den Hoff]

On Fri, Sep 05, 2008 at 01:23:48PM -0400, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> 
> On 4-Sep-08, at 7:31 PM, Joerg van den Hoff wrote:
> 
> >On Sep 05 2008 (Fri,  7:51), Jeff Kingston wrote:
> >>Joerg van den Hoff <address@hidden> wrote:
> >>>and as an accidental observation: if one increases the space width  
> >>>to
> >>>something nonsensical such as 1250, the postscript output does no  
> >>>longer
> >>>maintain the correct A4 pagewidth of 595 points (I think), but,  
> >>>for this
> >>>value of 1250, the pagewidth is increased substantially, namely to  
> >>>765.
> >>>where the text still occupies the original space, but the right  
> >>>page margin
> >>>seems increased. probably not important, but
> >>>is this possibly indication of a bug somewhere?
> >>
> >>I don't know.  It does sound strange.  If you think it's worth
> >>following up, post a small example and I'll look into it.
> >
> >I tried it with arbitrary text snippets. here it happens every time if
> >the output is viewed with `gv'.
> 
> GhostView almost always produces horrible inter-word and even inter- 
> letter spacing for me (at least on X11 displays), at least for lout  
> _and_ groff output but perhaps other generators too, and usually  
> regardless of which font faces or sizes are used (though some are far  
> worse than others).

I can't confirm this, neither for lout _nor_ for groff (gv's behaviour
sure should not depend on the formatter if both produce valid postscript):
if you enable the antialiasing and gv know's the font (that might be important: 
I believe
otherwise some fontmapping occurs which might indeed mess the appearance up) --
which definitely is the case for me, since palatino is one of the few 
"canonical"
fonts available everywhere (or,rather, an exact substitute), if this is the 
case,
than the display is flawless (concordant with printed output) for me.

and I checked, of course, after conversion to pdf with two pdf-viewers (xpdf 
and apple's `Preview'),
too. both show the same (although apple's pdf engine in fact _does_ have 
problems with
correct rendering in certain situations: well known bug, by the way). _and_ I 
printed
it. same story again. so my observations are real (jeff confirmed the first of 
these by the way). 

I think the point is whether this behaviour is typographically OK (or even 
desirable). I think it's
not, but there jeff seems to disagree. my most recent observation in this 
context
(not really related to inter-word spacing, of course) is, that hyphens are too 
close to
the preceding letter. just as a test if I'm too biased towards groff's 
behaviour I showed today
two printed(!) versions of the same letter to a troff/tex/lout agnostic person 
and asked what
looked wrong: "well the hyphens are too close in this one", which was the lout 
output.

but the "space compression" issue is more serious (although the hyphens should 
be moved 
away from the preceding letters, too).

as I said I'm really new to lout but already I feel that it's a great system by 
design.
_and_ I think it would be a pitty if it's not used because people are put off 
by certain
flaws in appearance of the output (I've found only the above, for sure!). the 
hyphen issue
should be easy to fix, I would guess. the inter-word spacing is, in places, not 
tolerable,
at least with palatino 12p (although it should not be exculsively occur for 
this font, I think).
and such singular ugly spots in a document can decide between using a system or 
leaving it alone.
at least for people taking the typographical quality aspect serious.

> 
> The real test is how it looks on the printed page -- especially from a  
> "real" PostScript(tm) printer.
> 
> I never trust the gv preview for any alignment or spacing issues.

that sounds strange to me. with "standard fonts" and antialiasing activated?
with a recent release of ghostscript and gv? In my experience gv does a 
very good job, even if one is looking closely.

what I really would be interest in is a "poll" on this list: if you are looking 
closely on your
recent documents: do you not see incidences of way too tight spacing between 
words? do you feel the spacing is
on average a) optimal, b) to loose, c) to tight? please ask yourself the same 
questions for your troff or
TeX documents (or Open Office, for that matter -- but not for msword :-)).

and, of course, thanks for your response,

joerg

> 
> -- 
>                                               Greg A. Woods
>                                               <address@hidden>
>