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I would like to ask you if you can tell me how can I redefine the command of \frenchspacing in LaTeX so there will be a little bit (only a little bit) tighter spaces between words than spaces in the French spacing. Will be grateful to those who help (and because of lack of other possibilities to express gratefulness I'm going to pray for you).

Paweł
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  • Welcome to TeX SX! With xelatex and the fontspec package, you have the command \addfontfeature{WordSpace=a scaling factor}, and also \addfontfeature{PunctuationSpace=a scaling factor} (§ 7.3 and 7.4 of the documentation). But please don't pray for me… – Bernard Nov 28 '15 at 23:59
  • Thank you very much. Last sentence - why not? :D – Paweł Nov 29 '15 at 00:00
  • I don't deserve that ;o) – Bernard Nov 29 '15 at 00:00
  • Politely don't agree. Everybody deserves :) – Paweł Nov 29 '15 at 00:02
  • \frenchspacing (normally) relies on \@m, which, according to texdef is set to 1000 (\mathchardef\@m=1000). See TeX by Topic for more details. – jon Nov 29 '15 at 01:00
  • @jon -- the setting of \@m to 1000 with reference to frenchspacing only determines whether \frenchspacing is "on" or "off". other things depend greatly on the fact that \@m=1000. resetting it doesn't affect the width of spaces, but it could upset a lot of other things. (the normal width of spaces is a font parameter. although it's possible to reset it, i don't recommend it.) – barbara beeton Nov 29 '15 at 21:20
  • if the intention is to tighten up lines, so that there are fewer lines overall, then you might try \looseness on a per-paragraph basis. see Which choice of line-breaking parameters gives the minimum number of lines – barbara beeton Nov 29 '15 at 21:25
  • @barbarabeeton -- Yes, sorry, I misread the question. I was thinking more about the \frenchspacing, which is about punctuation, and not about inter-word spacing at all. I agree: don't change it. But I do think it is salutary to learn where you can find out more information. – jon Nov 29 '15 at 22:38
  • I didn't really know that \frenchspacing is actually not about inter-word spacing. Nice to know :). When it comes to the sort of spacing, I thought rather about spaces between words. I read that the vital thing to change this spaces is using \setmainfont command, which is needed with,of course, \addfontfeature and the proper 'fontspec' package, as Bernard has written. Plethora of thanks for giving sources and helping me. – Paweł Nov 30 '15 at 22:22

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