Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: spacing after punctuation

Ken,

I'm about as anal as they come when it comes to fonts, and I've never really 
noticed much difference among the ones I use when it comes to white space 
around punctuation. I'll have to give them a closer look.

As to legal papers, many lawyers do use full justification in their legal 
briefs, but I never do. I don't know of any court rules that actually 
require full justification in court papers, so it is usually a matter of 
personal taste. I've always lived by the "rule" that justification looks 
more professional on first glance, but left aligned text increases 
comprehension. Usually, justified text is generated by adding extra white 
space in between words, resulting in inconsistent word spacing from line to 
line. Sometimes it will result in distracting rivers of white space down the 
page. And, when justification widens word spacing, it only exacerbates the 
width of two spaces between sentences.

LyX is a great program and it produces excellent results, especially with 
fonts having expert features such as old style numbering and true small 
caps. I've often used it myself, but I've found it works best when one 
accepts the LyX/LaTeX default settings. Changing the defaults can be 
somewhat challenging. Despite what I said above about justification, 
LyX/LaTeX does it extremely well, especially if you use the Microtype 
package. It makes microscopic adjustments not only between words, but 
*within* letters themselves to keep word spacing relatively consistent while 
reducing the need for hyphenated line endings. The result is stunning.

But, for normal business or legal work, I find LyX much too cumbersome for 
my needs. I much prefer LO in this setting.

Virgil

-----Original Message----- 
From: Ken Springer
Sent: Friday, September 06, 2013 9:36 PM
To: users@global.libreoffice.org
Subject: [libreoffice-users] Re: spacing after punctuation

On 9/6/13 6:56 PM, Virgil Arrington wrote:
> On 09/06/2013 05:20 PM, Ken Springer wrote:
> > On 9/5/13 9:23 AM, T. R. Valentine wrote:
> > > As a follow-up to our earlier discussion of one versus two spaces
> > > following a full point/full stop/period, I offer the following passage
> > > from /About Face: Reviving the Rules of Typography/ by David Jury
> > > (typos mine):
> >
> > <snip>
> >
> > <sigh>  With the different ways people reply to this group, this
> > discussion is all over the place when using gmane and a newsreader.   :-(
> >
> > I think I've got all of these messages read, and it seems to me
> > everyone has overlooked one thing, the font itself.  What did the
> > designer do with the individual characters and punctuation marks and
> > whatever else may be in the font regarding white space in the glyph
> > itself?
> >
> > It seems logical to me that's going to make a difference in whether
> > the spacing after a period, for example, should be 1, 1.5, or 2
> > spaces.  And maybe, you'll just have to do some manual kerning.
> >
> > Or...  Am I missing something?
> Ken,
>
> I don't think you're missing anything, but most of us aren't using LO to
> prepare the *final* version of a document for  professional publication
> (i.e., books, magazines, etc.). I would truly hope that a publishing
> house would do more than just take a word processing document and print
> it out in book format. (In fact, many professional writers use nothing
> more than Notepad, saying their publishers strip all user-inserted
> formatting anyway). So, if there's any manual kerning to be done, I
> would expect that to be done on a level far above LO.
>
> When I argue for one space instead of two, I'm thinking in terms of
> business letters, memos, legal briefs (I'm a lawyer) or scholastic
> papers (I also teach at our local university). These are the types of
> documents I prepare with LO, and when preparing them, I want to follow
> professional typographic standards as much as I can. Ergo, one space.
> But, manual kerning goes beyond what I think should be expected of
> anyone on this level of document preparation.

Virgil,

I understand wanting to follow "best shop practices" for printing.
Which is why I'm just starting out on giving LyX a run for some things I
want to write.

But, even being that anal (LOL), it doesn't answer my questions about
the design of the font itself, and the effect of the design, regardless
of who does the final setup of the document.

I kinda stayed out of the one space or two discussion, but if you look
at this post, which has both your style (one space) and mine (two
spaces), when it's a monospace font as I see this post I find the single
space more difficult to read.  Not terribly, but harder.   :-)  If if
the font is proportional, I generally stumble at the beginning when
reading a document of some kind that has single spaces at the end of the
sentence until the brain adjusts.  Too often, my brain interprets a
single spacing at the end of a sentence as just one long, very long, run
on sentence.  :-)

When I get the time, and have a reason to use LO again, I'm going to go
into the autocorrect function and see if I can follow my own suggestion
in another thread about substitution of a different space when the right
punctuation/space combinations are typed, following my ingrained habits.
   LOL

Kind of an off topic questions, but don't a lot of legal papers use full
justification?


--
Ken

Mac OS X 10.8.4
Firefox 23.0
Thunderbird 17.0.8
LibreOffice 4.1.04


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