On 15 Jan 2020, at 10:15, Hans Hagen wrote:

...

By the way, thin spaces are not specific to French typography, historically speaking, since they seem to have been used everywhere in Europe for centuries — at least in England, Belgium, Germany and Italy (probably in the Netherlands too, I will check). In France and sometimes in England, thin spaces were often used before commas as well. I wonder why most countries stopped using them. Out of laziness ? :-) never seen them in dutch ... i think not so much lazyness but side effect of going digital ... i bet that these spaces were also (ab)used to justify lines (cheat a bit) i.e. manual injection of some lead blob

Dutch typesetting had some rules for thin spaces in a transition period from full spaces (early) to no spaces (modern). Much of this change happened in the (late) 19th century, so I guess it had more to do with linotype/monotype than with modern digitisation. Best wishes, Taco

Arthur :

I think it happened at about the same time for English. Before that it was pretty universal. See https://archive.org/details/worksbenjaminfr06spargoog/page/n12 for just one example.

(The thin space in that example is really thin! -- but it’s definitely there)

Exactly. And this is precisely the thin space still required in French publications. The main disagreement among French typographs (about twenty years ago, at least) was about the fixed vs relative width of this thin space : put in TeX’s terms, should it be proportional to the glue or to the font ? I think I’d better write an article about this, with quotes and visual examples. Greetings Thomas Savary 1 le Grand-Plessis F-85340 L’Île-d’Olonne Tél. 06 22 82 61 34 https://compo85.fr/ mercredi 15 janvier 2020, à 13:02:00 CET, Arthur Reutenauer a écrit :

On Wed, Jan 15, 2020 at 11:29:35AM +0100, Taco Hoekwater wrote:

...

Dutch typesetting had some rules for thin spaces in a transition period from full spaces (early) to no spaces (modern).

Much of this change happened in the (late) 19th century, so I guess it had more to do with linotype/monotype than with modern digitisation. I think it happened at about the same time for English. Before that it was pretty universal. See https://archive.org/details/worksbenjaminfr06spargoog/page/n12 for just one example.

(The thin space in that example is really thin! -- but it’s definitely there)

Best,

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Hraban :

Since the current CG Journal is still "in progress", another article is welcome!

Thank you for this offer. As I don’t like half-measures, I really want to do it well, so I’m going to need a lot of time to collect historical as well as recent examples, quotations, etc. and to write this article. Unfortunately, I am pretty busy right now and probably won’t have time to start before March. Greetings Thomas Savary 1 le Grand-Plessis F-85340 L’Île-d’Olonne Tél. 06 22 82 61 34 https://compo85.fr/ mercredi 15 janvier 2020, à 16:16:21 CET, Henning Hraban Ramm a écrit :

...

Am 2020-01-15 um 16:10 schrieb Thomas Savary :

Exactly. And this is precisely the thin space still required in French publications. The main disagreement among French typographs (about twenty years ago, at least) was about the fixed vs relative width of this thin space : put in TeX’s terms, should it be proportional to the glue or to the font ?

I think I’d better write an article about this, with quotes and visual examples. Since the current CG Journal is still "in progress", another article is welcome!

Best, Hraban

____________________________________________________________________________ _______ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki!

maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://context.aanhet.net archive : https://bitbucket.org/phg/context-mirror/commits/ wiki : http://contextgarden.net ____________________________________________________________________________ _______

Hans :

never seen them [thin spaces] in dutch ... Example from a book published in Haarlem, 1838, “Gedichten van Nicolaas Beets” — you will even see thin spaces before commas, like in France in the 17th-18th century. https://books.google.fr/books? id=s1BUAAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

i think not so much lazyness but side effect of going digital ... i bet that these spaces were also (ab)used to justify lines (cheat a bit) i.e. manual injection of some lead blobs : The first books where I saw all thin spaces disappear were printed in the USA in the 20th century, after 1910 but certainly before 1960, so before digital publishing, but I am no specialist of type history.

keep in mind that we use values that were specified by french users ... however, as usual with language specific features, these can differ per user I guess that they unfortunately were no typographers. It is true that there are at least two different schools on this subject. I will explain all that when I have a bit more time.

Greetings Thomas Savary 1 le Grand-Plessis F-85340 L’Île-d’Olonne Tél. 06 22 82 61 34 https://compo85.fr/ mercredi 15 janvier 2020, à 10:15:45 CET, Hans Hagen a écrit :

On 1/14/2020 11:25 PM, Thomas Savary wrote:

...

Hello, dear list !

Joseph :

...

With LMTX (MkIV is fine) characterspacing (I use frenchpunctuation)

is not

...

applied sometimes (ie no spacing before colon for example) in some

parts of

Character-spacing for French punctuation marks is incorrect in MkIV anyway : the “thin” spaces are much too wide. I will write more about it when I have more time. I have just begun to lean ConTeXt. For the time being, I don’t use its automatic spacing for French punctuation, but real Unicode spaces such as U+202F (non breakable thin space, about 0.125 em, depending on the font).

keep in mind that we use values that were specified by french users ... however, as usual with language specific features, these can differ per user

anyway, it's configureable

...

By the way, thin spaces are not specific to French typography, historically speaking, since they seem to have been used everywhere in Europe for centuries — at least in England, Belgium, Germany and Italy (probably in the Netherlands too, I will check). In France and sometimes in England, thin spaces were often used before commas as well. I wonder why most countries stopped using them. Out of laziness ? :-)

never seen them in dutch ... i think not so much lazyness but side effect of going digital ... i bet that these spaces were also (ab)used to justify lines (cheat a bit) i.e. manual injection of some lead blob

Hans

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