There is no way to change the spacing between words, and i think it's a very important setting, given that the space between words that LO uses atm, is just very small. Reading something in LO is way more tiresome than reading in Calibre's Bookviewer for example, where the spacing is bigger which increases the readibility a lot. There is a sweet spot, but that's propably very subjective. Anyway, i wanted to request this overlooked feature and urge everybody to look into comparisons about short and long spacing between words. Here's is just one article that talks about that: https://creativepro.com/the-complete-guide-to-word-spacing/ Regards! jojo
Controlling interword spacing to optimize legibility should be possible, but would depend on how much dev effort it would need to implement/refactor. Otherwise isn't this out of scope for an office suite, trending deep into the realm of Desktop Publishing? And not clear the work it would require is justified. IIUC we work simply with spacing derived from font metrics, with some limited ability in GUI to adjust glyph kerning, or apply kashida, for intraword spacing Paragraph justification works against the margin settings to distribute word spacing, and revise hyphenation when needed. While "register true" is applied at the page margins to assure paragraph lines align page to page. Who knows, perhaps some HarfBuzz magic?
You can already scale the width of spaces manually. I think any thing beyond that, is out of scope for an office suite.
(In reply to Regina Henschel from comment #2) > You can already scale the width of spaces manually. I think any thing beyond > that, is out of scope for an office suite. @Regina, you've stumped me. Nothing obvious in GUI, nor in Expert Configuration stanzas. So, where is the user control to "scale the width of spaces"?
@V Stuart Foote: You can mark the space and then use Format > Character. Then use tab "Position". It has the option "Rotation/Scaling" and there "scale width". I use a reduced width on a non-breaking space between number and unit to reduce the distance between number and unit.
(In reply to Regina Henschel from comment #4). @Regina a bit hackish, but you are right we can use Find & Replace to find all Spaces--then from the Character dialog scale the selection--just the spaces. But looking at Flat ODT result, see a T1 defined with a scale of 300%, and then every word in the paragraph is broken by a text span holding the space with its scaling. Also, interesting in that when showing NPC the blue dot for the spaces are also scaled/stretched, weird. Just not sure that would be functional for folks in general. Every space baloons into a 46 character <text:span>, and breaks up the paragraph. Thanks though! -- Stuart
s/just the spaces./just the spaces at 300%.
There exists a CSS property "word-spacing". https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/pr_text_word-spacing.asp or https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/word-spacing. It exists in XSL-fo too, but not in ODF. https://www.w3.org/TR/xsl/#word-spacing
Let's close it as WF based on comment 2 (if you replace one space by two per find/replace it has the same effect as scaling to 200%). Plus, readability comes with the font and we shouldn't compensate for a "creative" kerning.