Re: VMs: Half spaces ...

[Koontz John E <John.Koontz@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 19 Aug 2004, Rene Zandbergen wrote:
> Now, since the concept of half spaces having some special meaning is not
> a standard thing,

Speaking up in support of Rene, I instinctively consider it unlikely that
degrees of spacing matter.  And how much use is my instinct on that?!
But perhaps I just haven't run into the orthographic traditions where
degrees of spacing are significant?  I'd expect a physical mark as an
alternative spacing rather than variations in amounts of blank space,
except to produce things like mutual alignments in columns or placing
labels adjacent to illustrations.

In addition, everyone observes the patterns in the distribution of
characters within words, and we have just been considering the cases where
two "words" sometimes occur written as one.  I think this tells us that
even without a clue as to the sense of the text we have some instinctive
ability to detect "word" boundaries because we know what sorts of patterns
constitute words.  In a case like this, spacing is perhaps not absolutely
critical and sometimes "words" are run together or put closer together
because the author in such cases perceived the boundaries in logical terms
and didn't really depend on spacing to see the boundaries.  Fortunately
for us (maybe) he chose to put them in most of the time.

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