Re: too small inter-word spacing

[Michael Piotrowski]

On 2008-09-08, "Martti Haukijärvi" <address@hidden> wrote:

>> 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?
>
> Most of spacing is OK, but often (a couple of times in every page)
> spacing is too tight. This is visible especially at the end of
> sentences, dots being too close to next word. Perhaps this is problem
> with those languages which have a lot of long words, like Finnish? In
> English words are shorter and hyphenation seems not to be used so
> routinely as in Finnish, for example.  Perhaps the hyphenation penalty
> should be lowered for such languages.

Yes, I have a similar impression: Spacing for English is ok, but for
German (also known for its long words) it is often too tight.  I've
therefore frequently used something like @InitialSpace {compress +0.2s}
(as I've posted earlier); I now know its not a general solution, but it
helped in my cases.

I'm only chiming in here because I just yesterday had a case (in a
German letter) where interword spacing was too tight; for example, "bei
der" (at the) looked like "beider" (of both).  I agree with Martti that
this is probably an interaction with hyphenation; the problem was solved
by setting a hyphenation point in the last word of the line.

Greetings

-- 
Michael Piotrowski, M.A.                               <address@hidden>
Public key at <http://www.dynalabs.de/mxp/pubkey.txt> (ID 0x1614A044)