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