I want to use a hair spaces before exclamation marks, question marks, colons, and semicolons. Additionally, I want to put them before and after en and em dashes. This is to prevent words from being too close to the punctuation, while also not using the ugly French convention of using a thin space or word space instead of a hair space. Upon getting the width of a regular word space, thin space, and hair space in LaTeX, these are my findings:
A word space is 0.2em.
A thin space is half of a word space: 0.1em.
A hair space is one tenth of a thin space: 0.01em.
In this typeface, the hair space is so small that in order to notice the difference I literally have to draw a vertical line between two of the same phrase (one that has it and one that doesn’t) separated by a line break to notice that it exists. The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst defines a hair space as being 1/24 of an em. However, I still think this is a little too small. It might be wise to set the width of a hair space as half the width of a word space, thus it would be 1/20 of an em.
I want to use a hair spaces before exclamation marks, question marks, colons, and semicolons. Additionally, I want to put them before and after en and em dashes. This is to prevent words from being too close to the punctuation, while also not using the ugly French convention of using a thin space or word space instead of a hair space. Upon getting the width of a regular word space, thin space, and hair space in LaTeX, these are my findings:
In this typeface, the hair space is so small that in order to notice the difference I literally have to draw a vertical line between two of the same phrase (one that has it and one that doesn’t) separated by a line break to notice that it exists. The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst defines a hair space as being 1/24 of an em. However, I still think this is a little too small. It might be wise to set the width of a hair space as half the width of a word space, thus it would be 1/20 of an em.