Re: Margin kerning, inter-sentence spacing and drawings

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Matej Nanut <address@hidden> skribis:

> 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.)

Agreed, something should be done about it.

The TeX Book (Chapter 12) reads this:

  Abbreviations present problems too. For example, the short story in
  Chapter 6 referred to ‘Mr. Drofnats’; TEX must be told somehow that
  the period after ‘Mr.’ or ‘Mrs.’ or ‘Ms.’ or ‘Prof.’ or ‘Dr.’ or
  ‘Rt. Hon.’, etc., doesn’t count as a sentence-ending full stop.

  We avoided that embarrassment in Chapter 6 by typing ‘Mr.~Drofnats’;
  the “tie” mark ~ tells plain TEX to insert a normal space, and to
  refrain from breaking between lines at that space. Another way to get
  TEX to put out a normal space is to type ‘\ ’ (control space); e.g.,
  ‘Mr.\ Drofnats’ would be almost the same as ‘Mr.~Drofnats’, except
  that a line might end after the ‘Mr.’.

Perhaps a similar approach could be used—i.e., the default post-period
space would be larger than the inter-word space, and users would have to
explicitly use ‘~’ for post-abbreviation spaces.

Now, how would such a change be made in a backward-compatible way?
Ideas?

Thanks,
Ludo’.