Re: [Groff] space width

[Tadziu Hoffmann]

> http://www.heracliteanriver.com/?p=324

Many thanks for pointing out that article!

This reminds me of a similar discussion on typophile
(http://typophile.com/node/56108) in which one of the
participants (near the end of the thread) shows an interesting
visual experiment with sentence space, based on a historical
document.  (Plus, the discussion also mentions TeX and groff.)

If I may hazard a guess, it is possible that the notion of
*doubling* the space did indeed come from typewriters, where
spaces came in one size only.  In lead typesetting there were
spaces of many different widths, and the typesetter probably
did not insert two "normal" spaces, but simply a larger space
(e.g., a quad).