Character Spacing

Feature requests, and in-depth discussions of features and the way Mellel works

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devananda
Got the styles thing figured out
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Character Spacing

Post by devananda »

Is it possible to have character spacing and mellel?
rpcameron
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Re: Character Spacing

Post by rpcameron »

If you mean to manually adjust intercharacter spacing, I do not believe this is presently possible. The best way I know around this limitation is using a font family with a full set of opticals, such as different faces for captions, text, headings, titling, &c.
— Robert Cameron
nicka
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Re: Character Spacing

Post by nicka »

True, it's not possible.

Well-designed typefaces and ones with different optical sizes (e.g. these ones from Adobe) certainly make the lack less glaring, but there are times when good typographic design requires letter-spacing: most times small caps are used, for example. See Bringhurst, quoted at the top of this page.
c paul b
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Re: Character Spacing

Post by c paul b »

If, as seems unlikely, Mellel is not to have character spacing, is QuarkXPress compatible with Mellel? That is, can I take text, including footnotes and quotations of poetry and the like, from Mellel to Quark?

I read a week to two ago what I reckoned was the near-perfectly designed book: Michael Innes' Operation Pax (Gollancz, 1951). The font was Baskerville, largely indistinguishable from Monotype's offering—if not precisely that—and the character spacing was all that I could wish for. Wonderful. And, as always by this particular Innes, a good novel to boot.

So that's the object.

Regards,

c paul b
rpcameron
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Re: Character Spacing

Post by rpcameron »

c paul b wrote:If, as seems unlikely, Mellel is not to have character spacing, is QuarkXPress compatible with Mellel? That is, can I take text, including footnotes and quotations of poetry and the like, from Mellel to Quark?

I read a week to two ago what I reckoned was the near-perfectly designed book: Michael Innes' Operation Pax (Gollancz, 1951). The font was Baskerville, largely indistinguishable from Monotype's offering—if not precisely that—and the character spacing was all that I could wish for. Wonderful. And, as always by this particular Innes, a good novel to boot.

So that's the object.

Regards,

c paul b
You can export to RTF, which will retain most formatting. However, finer points such as note streams, cross-references and auto-titles may not be fully supported by the export.
— Robert Cameron
c paul b
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Re: Character Spacing

Post by c paul b »

Splendid. Many thanks.

c paul b
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