Re: too small inter-word spacing

[Vadim Nasardinov]

On Tuesday 02 September 2008 05:15:47 pm Jeff Kingston wrote:
> 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.

Knuth's advice was given in the context of TeX where whitespace
handling is quite different from Lout's default approach.  In TeX, the
following two paragraphs are equivalent from the interword whitespace
standpoint:

Paragraph #1:

| Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly |
| good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.            |

Paragraph #2:

| Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly |
| good    library out of   a library that hadn't a book in       it. |

A quick note on notation: the pipe symbol "|" (a.k.a. "vertical bar")
is used purely for quoting here.  To better see the difference between
these two paragraphs, you want to view this message with a fixed-width
font.

From TeX's point of view, the two paragraphs are exactly the same.
Runs of consecutive whitespace characters count as a single space.
Not so in Lout.  By default, the above paragraphs would be typeset
quite differently.  

The point is, you can "loosen up" interword whitespace by simply adding
extra spaces between offending words in the source document.  That's
easier than rephrasing the offending paragraph.




P.S.  The mailing list's archive page 
http://lists.planix.com/pipermail/lout-users/
is giving me a 404 tonight.