Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!guido From: guido@cwi.nl (Guido van Rossum) Newsgroups: comp.fonts Subject: Re: Space Message-ID: <346@piring.cwi.nl> Date: 3 Jun 88 14:53:03 GMT References: <4292@gryphon.CTS.COM> <6179@cup.portal.com> Reply-To: guido@cwi.nl (Guido van Rossum) Organization: The Royal Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Amoebae Lines: 24 > How big should a space be ? I'm amazed at the number of people who anser this question without even (apparently) pondering the context. The kind of discussion that could follow (I'm sure nobody knows the right answer :-) depends on whether you are designing a font, using a wordprocessor, designing a formatting algorithm... Basically, the font designer defines how wide a space for a given font should be (after all, it is a character in the font!). With good fonts there should also be guidelines for the minimum and maximum spaces to use when stretching or shrinking a line to get the right amrgin straight. TeX allows certain spaces to stretch slightly more (between sentences, or after a comma, for instance). These rules should be used by "the rest of the world". Now if you're designing a font, this doesn't answer your question. Like almost every other question a font designer could ask (and should try to answer for herself!), the answer lies in "does it look good?" Here you obviously cannot expect an answer from the net. -- Guido van Rossum, Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), Amsterdam guido@piring.cwi.nl or mcvax!piring!guido or guido%piring.cwi.nl@uunet.uu.net