calculating word space

Miles Newlyn

The one glyph that I've never been confident in designing is the word space. 

I'm currently working on a extended sans and the word space presents a quandary.

How do you do it?

Mark Simonson

The rule of thumb I saw ages ago (in U&lc. I think) was the width of the lowercase /i. I think this works in a regular or medium weight, but I find going a little wider than that in the lightest weight and narrower in the heaviest weight, since it is related to the white space in the counters. Narrower for condensed, wider for extended. The relative tightness or looseness of the default spacing is also a factor: wider for looser spacing; narrower for tighter spacing.

I use 250 units as a starting point for a normal width, regular weight. And, of course, let your eye be the final judge.

John Butler

Frank Blokland discusses word spacing in Chapter 5 of his dissertation starting on page 121.

Nick Shinn

I fine tune by comparing paragraphs with different H&J settings—one can modify the “word space” width in this manner, without having to generate separate fonts.

Dave Crossland

https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/pr_text_word-spacing.php

John Hudson

The CSS word-spacing property seems poorly conceived, and I wonder if its existence contributed to or is symptomatic of the thinking that led browser makers to apply OpenType Layout at the word-by-word level, preventing cross-space contexts or shaping that affects the /space glyph itself?

Thomas Phinney

Wait, word-spacing "normal" sets it to 1/4 em? So “normal” means “ignore the font data”?! But if you don’t explicitly set word-spacing, it… what, accepts the font’s word-spacing, which would make the default behavior and "normal" two different things? 🤯

I must be misunderstanding this. Surely.

John Hudson

Yes, I think the word-spacing property is only active if explicitly used in the CSS code, otherwise font spacing is used (but some browsers may still break OTL at every word space).

Some CSS properties make a distinction between Auto and Normal; word-spacing doesn’t seem to have an Auto setting, but I think that is on the assumption that the property is only used if one wants to affect the word spacing to be something other than the font metrics.

Also note that w3schools.com is not associated with the World Wide Web Consortium, and is not an official or necessarily up-to-date source of CSS specification.