Text Formatting ⇒ Vintage kerning
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Vintage kerning
How would one go about emulating the kernings from mechanical typesetting?
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- Johannes_B
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Re: Vintage kerning
I have no idea what you mean or what you are trying to achieve. Can you elaborate a bit?
The smart way: Calm down and take a deep breath, read posts and provided links attentively, try to understand and ask if necessary.
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Re: Vintage kerning
Mechanic glyphs have a fixed width, and there is no kerning based on specific combinations (as far as I know). That's what I want, interglyph spacing that looks like it's from an old book.
- Johannes_B
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Vintage kerning
Oh, there was indeed kerning with mechanical type. Some of them even formed ligatures as still used today in modern typesetting.
I think you want the output of a typewriter (a monospaced font). You can get this with
I think you want the output of a typewriter (a monospaced font). You can get this with
\texttt
or \ttfamily
.The smart way: Calm down and take a deep breath, read posts and provided links attentively, try to understand and ask if necessary.
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Re: Vintage kerning
I don't want all glyphs to have the same width, but rather each glyph to have one width regardless of the glyphs surrounding it …
- Johannes_B
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Vintage kerning
In classical typesetting, there was also kerning. The metal blocks for the special kerning pairs were prepared by hand.
You can completely disable kerning by inserting an empty group between letters, this will be a bit tedious though.
I just learned that this method is not very reliable (especially with LuaTeX). Better here would be
You can work with package microtype and add a special rule for all letters, this will disable hyphenation as well.
You can set this more globally by changing a copy of the metric files for a specific font. You can change them to human-readable format using
With fontspec and Open-type fonts, disbling kerning might be a bit easier, but you need to have a matching font. Please see Disable automatic kerning and Turning off TeXnical enhancements.
Please note, turning off kernning is kind of a crime from a typographical point of view.
Thanks to Barbara Beeton, Joseph Right, David Carlisle, Ulrike Fischer and others who helped composing this answer.
You can completely disable kerning by inserting an empty group between letters, this will be a bit tedious though.
Code: Select all
Code, edit and compile here:
\documentclass{article}\begin{document}VA Ta\parV{}A T{}a\parV{\rule{.1pt}{\baselineskip}}A T{}a\parV\kern0pt\relax A\end{document}
V\kern0pt\relax A
.You can work with package microtype and add a special rule for all letters, this will disable hyphenation as well.
You can set this more globally by changing a copy of the metric files for a specific font. You can change them to human-readable format using
tftopl
, change the copy and repack it using pltotf
.With fontspec and Open-type fonts, disbling kerning might be a bit easier, but you need to have a matching font. Please see Disable automatic kerning and Turning off TeXnical enhancements.
Please note, turning off kernning is kind of a crime from a typographical point of view.
Thanks to Barbara Beeton, Joseph Right, David Carlisle, Ulrike Fischer and others who helped composing this answer.
The smart way: Calm down and take a deep breath, read posts and provided links attentively, try to understand and ask if necessary.
- Stefan Kottwitz
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Vintage kerning
Hi Laurentius!
You can test it here - compare Ta with and without:
By default, a would be close to the T, under the top bar. After
Stefan
Interesting question. I remember with microtype we can switch off ligatures and specific kerning together byLaurentius wrote:Mechanic glyphs have a fixed width, and there is no kerning based on specific combinations (as far as I know).
Code: Select all
\DisableLigatures{encoding=*}
Code: Select all
Code, edit and compile here:
\documentclass{article}\usepackage[english]{babel}\usepackage{blindtext}\usepackage{microtype}\DisableLigatures{encoding=*}\begin{document}Table\end{document}
\DisableLigatures{encoding=*}
that is gone.Stefan
LaTeX.org admin
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Re: Vintage kerning
Thank you for your answers. I didn't realize that there was special kerning even in mechanical typesetting. Would there be anything smaller than 1 pt (= 1 hair space)? My assumption was that computer typesetting allows for and uses more fine-grained kerning, and that turning it off would yield a charming antique look. Perhaps, in light of your reply (J. B.'s), this should rather be acheived by limiting oneself to the kerning units that were available in the olden days -- ?
L.
L.
- Johannes_B
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Vintage kerning
Typesetting is arts and crafts to some extend. Have a look at https://www.google.de/search?q=kerning+ ... sQGk1baoBg
Many (good) typesetters actually removed parts of the metal block and hand-fitted it to another.
I am not really sure what you are after.
Don Knuth started to develop TeX because photo-typesetting didn't produce the quality of the old metal monotype composition, and monotype was going extinct. Chat transcript
Many (good) typesetters actually removed parts of the metal block and hand-fitted it to another.
I am not really sure what you are after.
Don Knuth started to develop TeX because photo-typesetting didn't produce the quality of the old metal monotype composition, and monotype was going extinct. Chat transcript
The smart way: Calm down and take a deep breath, read posts and provided links attentively, try to understand and ask if necessary.
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- Posts: 132
- Joined: Wed Feb 11, 2009 11:38 pm
Vintage kerning
Do you mean that they had, say, may kinds of f for different combinations?Many (good) typesetters actually removed parts of the metal block and hand-fitted it to another.
I used Fontforge to remove all specific kerning pairs from Adobe Caslon Pro, adjusted the general borders, and added three new specific kerning rules. As far as I can see, the result is not worse than the original. There are some problems, but I think they can be solved with much fewer special rules than there were in the original. On the other hand, it doesn't look so much better either.
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