Re: Margin kerning, inter-sentence spacing and drawings

[Matej Nanut]

Thanks for the reply. I think I will live without margin kerning for
the moment. While the feature is nice, it's only really noticeable in
very narrow columns, which I don't intend to use soon.

As for spacing between sentences, I will use the "compress" @Space
option and manually insert "~~" (or some other symbol that I'll
define) with a definable amount of spacing. Either way, I've read all
over the internet that double-spacing is not to be used anymore in
modern typography, but many people also disagree. There was not much
mention of x1.3 spacing or similiar, though. (I myself am not sure
where I stand on this argument.)

Matej.

On 15 July 2012 00:58, Jeff Kingston <address@hidden> wrote:
> Matej,
>
>> 1. I've recently discovered the "margin kerning"/"character
>> protrusion" typographic feature and see that it is implemented in Lout
>> as a @Break parameter.
>>
>> Here's my question: it doesn't seem to put hyphens into the margin. Is
>> this deliberate? LaTeX's microtype package does it, and I quite like
>> it. In Lout it seems to do it only for periods and commas (and I
>> haven't tried other similiar punctuation marks). Is it possible to add
>> hyphens to the list of margin-kernable characters somehow?
>>
>> Also, is the feature in any way configurable? It seems like the whole
>> character protrudes into the margin. I would prefer it if only a
>> portion of it would (for the comma, for example).
>
> The margin kerning code was written by Ludovic Courtes, and I'm not
> exactly sure what it does.  But you can read about it in file z14.c of
> the distribution, functions KernWordLeftMargin and KernWordRightMargin.
> It seems to depend on the widths of the characters, not their values.
>
>> 2. As for the inter-sentence part: is it possible to configure its
>> extra spacing? It feels like a whole extra space is too much at times,
>> and I wouldn't want to add something like "&1.3s" into the code
>> wherever I end a sentence. I could change the meaning of "~~" but that
>> doesn't affect literal double spaces. Is my only choice writing "~~"
>> explicitly? It would also be nice if "~~" was parameterised in a setup
>> file. I think that in TeX, the extra spacing is defined by the font.
>> This seems like a good idea.
>
> I'm afraid that the inter-sentence gap is hard-wired to be an integer
> multiple of the gap between words (e.g. z08.c line 1151).  You could
> use the @Space operator to change it, but that would change both the
> space between sentences and the space between words.
>
> In such cases it is generally best to get to like what Lout offers.
> The possible options are endless really, and the only practical way
> is for the system to go halfway to meet its users, and for the users
> to go halfway to meet the system.
>
>> 3. Is it possible to do something like this:
>> "http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/rotated-triangle/"; in Lout? The
>> first problem I come accross is how to implement addition (like +10)
>> cleanly.
>
> I gather Uwe has already tackled this one.
>
> Jeff