letter spacing

I put a note up at curl.com today as I hope to see more options in Curl 8.0 for text formatting.

This arose when I was looking at the old University of California Press reprint of Mary Barnard's translation of fragments of Sappho.  That book has many nice features, such as the suppression of page numbers on poetry pages (the fragments themselves are numbered) and the Greek key pattern preceding each fragment number.

That book got me to thinking about stanza spacing and the advent of both line-spacing and word-spacing.

A large part of what distinguishes poetry from prose is the line - and spacing can be as essential as the choice of font.

One Canadian poetry e-journal rejects submissions with spacing not to the editor's taste (this may reflect his frustration with HTML+CSS as much as anything aesthetic.)

I can only hope that Curl 8.0 will offer the spacing features that we are currently denied by HTML, CSS, IE and Microsoft.  Curl does allow control of line-spacing at this time (negative values compress, positive expand, the default.)