OpenType Font Variations for Spaces

Florian Pircher

I am considering adding a variation axis to my font that controls the width of spaces. The reason is that Unicode contains a broad yet inconsistent set of space characters. They differ mainly in width and whether or not to prevent a line break. When wearing my typographer hat, I find the Unicode spaces-set quite limiting and frequently wish for a non-breaking space that was a bit narrower or a bit wider. All non-breaking spaces that the universal codespace offers are U+00A0 (word space width), U+202F (narrow), U+2007 (figure width), and U+2060 (zero width).

Use cases include:

• a comma after an en/em dash “[…] – […] – , […]”, where some want to insert a thin non-breaking space between the dash and the comma
• French quotation marks, where many strong opinions exist on exactly how wide the non-breaking space between quote and letter shall be
• other punctuation, e.g., a thin non-breaking space before the percentage “%” sign
• abbreviations such as “z. B.” where a non-breaking word space may appear a bit too wide, while U+202F is too narrow (I have seen prestige fonts that have a slightly narrow U+00A0 compared to the regular U+0020, probably to address abbreviations, but that is not a good solution)
• sentence spacing, where a single word space would be enlarged if set between two sentences (here again many strong opinions on how wide such a space shall be, in case the sentence space should differ at all from the word space)

So, my idea is to add a “Space width” variation axis (SPWD) with a range of 0–600 and a default of 100. 0 sets the width of space glyphs to zero, 600 multiplies the width by 6 (600% width). The axis would apply to all Unicode spaces so that the most semantically correct choice could still be made while allowing for the desired visual delimitation. The extra drawing work and file size increases are manageable.

I don’t want this to be a discussion about whether any of the listed use cases are valid – that is not for the type designer to decide – but whether a variation axis for space widths is technically/semantically sound and the proposed implementation is sensible.

Thomas Phinney

Sounds technically viable, sure.

Peter Constable

As far as the OT spec is concerned, that's completely valid.

Florian Pircher

Thank you for the confirmation.

RichardW

U+2060 WORD JOINER isn't a space; it shall be purely a line-break suppressor.  (Language-specific word-boundary detecting algorithms, as for Thai, might be allowed to use it as a word-boundary suppressor.)  It should have no effect on the lay-out within a line beyond establishing what goes on the same line.  The same goes for U+FEFF ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE.

As far as a font goes, U+200B should also have no effect, unless your font is trying to detect word boundaries.

Florian Pircher

U+2060 can be used together with the other Unicode spaces, allowing for a larger set of non-breaking spaces. It’s still a limited set and the technique is not supported in all typesetting environments. U+FEFF is mostly used as a byte order mark, but changing the width of a zero-width space glyph still results in a zero-width glyph, so they will not be part of the variation anyway.

Simon Cozens

Florian Pircher said:

The extra drawing work and file size increases are manageable.

People always underestimate how much work is involved in drawing those particular glyphs...

AzizMostafa AzizAli

As far as Arabic is concerned, spaces are so varied that they go from zero-width non-joiner to overlapping as demonstrated here http://Youtube.com/watch?v=itZ66gUVVCI
Happy exploring with Flowers https://T.me/FlowerCrosswords/95 @ https://T.me/FonJawi/693