Re: [elreq] Interaction of quotes and wordspace (#131)

Great question, and one with no definitive answer except that it is left to the author's discretion.  To arrive at a best practice, I began a book survey this past summer, that among other things, looks into this very question:

https://w3c.github.io/elreq/style-guide/FormattingSurveyQuestions.html

It will be a while before I can get through the survey, I expect over the winter.  So far, the wordspace before the opening quotation mark is seen regularly, before or after the closing quotation mark is variable.  A difficulty in establishing a norm, is that the authors are far from consistent within a given work.  Post-survey, the results would be put before the modern author and publisher communities to remark on.

On the white space before and after a wordspace as in the wikipedia example, it is not a classic norm, but has become a norm with digital publishing.  This is done to take advantage of justification features in word processors and web browsers, and otherwise help layout engines behave sanely.  Since wordspace is _not_ treated as a space, a sentence or paragraph using it will be treated as a single long string, which is problematic for formatting. In a short sample, like the above, the spaces may have been added for visual clarity since computer fonts don't usually include much design space around the visible symbol.

A trick publishers use is to _pad_ wordspace with ASCII space to get line layout to work closer to the expected.  This adds a lot of data to a document but is the only way to reach the visual end desired.  When I layout a book using wordspace, if the letter height is 11pts for example, I'll use find-and-repace features to set the padding-spaces to 4pts, so that they are thin but allow justification to be applied.  Then if the wordwrap leads to too few words per line, go back and reduce space size further.  The final wordspace on a line does not need to be padded.  There is a bit more to the manual algorithm, but you get the idea.

With mechanical type, the typesetters had the ability to leave a _gap_ between the wordspace and end/start of surrounding words.  The gap was as-needed and was of variable size, so a virtual space might appear in print. But this should not be perceived as spaces added, just justification done right -something we'd like software to become capable of.


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Received on Sunday, 13 November 2022 13:22:22 UTC