If I have the following, with these linebreaks as in: {\par But a system cannot be successful if it is too strongly influenced by a single person. {\obeylines Once the initial design is complete and fairly robust, the real test begins as people with many different viewpoints undertake their own experiments.}} and opted to load another font, other than cmr that is, a \frenchspacing approach wouldn't be further required Bear with me here, in the current state, for example, and as long as say «…person.␣{\obeylines Once the initial is complete…» though feasible enough, leaves any prior \␣ at the mercy of whatever fontsize and/or set width happens to be. And this is just plain wrong. Likewise, if a word sequence such as \TeX\ occurs as in {\ss The separation of any of these four components would have hurt \TeX\ significantly. } The next sentence: «If I had not participated…» does not get any \nofrenchspacing which is equally and doubly problematic. It shows lack of consistency. And this ought not to be an ‹either› ‹or› scenario. But rather, an and conjunctional construct. It fails both ways. Furthermore, with the same token, if width is specified with a \setuplayout[width=15cm] Anything less than 12.895pt, especifically for that use case, wwould throw anything, particularly control sequences such as \TeX\ out of whack, and conversely, once a value of that very pt or pica or whatever is lowered, it brings that nonfrenchspacing right back on. And if width increments occur, then it follows that any control sequence kerning also gets thrown off as a result. It seems so far, that with lmtx, any standalone file, document, minimal working example that does not load cmr at the outset does not produce an acceptable outcome either. By saying acceptable I meant to say it namely from a typographical point of view. Nothing else. from the TeXbook 380-381 «\obeylines doesn’t say ‘\def^^M{\par}’, so we must make any desired changes to \par before invoking \obeylines. (2) The \uncatcodespecials operation changes a space to category 12; but the \tt font has the character ‘␣’ in the ⟨space⟩ position, so we don’t really want ␣12 . (3) The \obeyspaces macro in Appendix B merely changes the ⟨space⟩ character to category 13; active character ␣13 has been defined to be the same as \space, a macro that expands to ␣10 . This is usually what is desired; for example, it means that spaces in constructions like ‘\hbox to 10 pt {...}’ won’t cause any trouble. But in our application it has an undesirable effect, because it produces spaces that are affected by the space factor. To defeat this feature, it’s necessary either to say \frenchspacing or to redefine ␣13 to be the same as \␣. The latter alternative is better, because the former will discard spaces at the beginning of each line.» «In theory, this seems like it ought to work; but in practice, it fails in two ways. One rather obvious failure—at least, it becomes obvious when the macro is tested—is that all the empty lines of the file are omitted. The reason is that the \par command at the end of an empty line doesn’t start up a new paragraph, because it occurs in vertical mode. The other failure is not as obvious, because it occurs much less often: The \tt fonts contain ligatures for Spanish punctuation, so the sequences ?‘ and !‘ will be printed as ¿ and ¡ respectively. Both of these defects can be cured by inserting and «When INITEX creates a brand new TEX, all characters have a space factor code of 1000, except that the uppercase letters ‘A’ through ‘Z’ have code 999. (This slight difference is what makes punctuation act differently after an uppercase letter; do you see why?) Plain TEX redefines a few of these codes using the \sfcode primitive, which is similar to \catcode (see Appendix B); for example, the instructions \sfcode‘)=0 \sfcode‘.=3000 make right parentheses “transparent” to the space factor, while tripling the stretcha- bility after periods. The \frenchspacing operation resets \sfcode‘. to 1000.» -- If at first you don't succeed, you must be a programmer.