On Fri, Nov 14, 2014, Mike Bianchi wrote: > It seems ease of reading or better comprehension (which are the reasons I > prefer extra space after sentences, etc.) have nothing to do with "the rules." > Sigh.
I wouldn't say "nothing," but the issue of spacing between sentences is tricky and hard to pin down with a rule or algorithm. The choice of typeface plays an important role. Overall, Didone typefaces don't benefit from sentence spacing. For example, the contrast between thick and thin in Bodoni creates a rhythm that becomes choppy when sentence spacing is introduced. On the other hand, the readability of humanist typefaces like Garamond is improved by discreet "pauses" in the flow of text. The matter gets more complicated when you have sentences that end with "r." or "y.". The period should be kerned back, which can result in visibly uneven sentence spacing. Same goes for sentences that begin with "T" or "W" or "Y". Without some manual adjustment, the space between sentences appears larger than the prevailing norm. BTW--something I've never figured out is whether it's possible to set up kern pairs in groff font files that have "space" as the first element of the pair. I pipe my files through sed(1) to catch space-W, space-T, etc and kern them, but it would be great to have these pairs included in the kerning tables. -- Peter Schaffter http://www.schaffter.ca