cosmetic issue: spacing between quotation marks and parentheses
Today my screen is set just right to highlight a problem I've seen on several occasions. It's purely a cosmetic issue, so it will only bug those of us who aspire to be typesetters. 
And it applies only to users who have their resources justified (i.e. aligned to the right margin as well as to the left).
The example below shows that an opening parenthesis causes no grief when it follows a regular alphabetic character, as in lines 2 and 3.
But when an opening parenthesis follows a (closing) quotation mark, the intervening space appears to be a fixed width. It's not stretching in the same way that justification causes all the other spaces in the line to stretch. The second-last line here shows this especially clearly, twice:
For those wanting to replicate the issue: this text happens to be Eckhard Schnabel's ZECNT volume on Acts 17:4, though I'm sure I've seen it in lots/all resources. This is Logos 9.17(.0.0018); I'm yet to get to L10.
Comments
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I can also see the same thing happening when the parentheses follow a single quotation mark.
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And, for an even starker example, see the third line here:
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My suspicions are further confirmed by the following example. The second line shows that spaces are usually stretchable. But the third line clearly suggests that the space between the quotation mark and the parenthesis is something like a fixed-width, non-breaking space. Hence the whole "single" term – i.e. “Revealed”_(ἀποκαλυφθῇ) – has wrapped onto a new line.
Is there any good reason why such spaces should be treated as non-breaking?
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Andrew Malone said:
Is there any good reason why such spaces should be treated as non-breaking?
This question needs to be broken down into two parts:
- when FL creates the electronic file, does it generate a breaking or non-breaking space in this situation?
- When FL receives an electronic file from the publisher, can FL override the publisher's coding in this situation?
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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Good points, MJ. I've not done an exhaustive check of every FL resource. But my impression is that this is a very consistent formatting phenomenon (my three screenshots above are from three separate resources). So I'm assuming your first bullet more than the second: this seems as much to be something that FL introduces rather than receives from publishers.
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A fourth example (middle line) just to confirm that the phenomenon really does appear to be with FL's encoding. This is a fourth resource – and from yet another publisher (on another continent).
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