Text Formatting ⇒ Vintage kerning

[Laurentius]

How would one go about emulating the kernings from mechanical typesetting?

[Johannes_B]

I have no idea what you mean or what you are trying to achieve. Can you elaborate a bit?

[Laurentius]

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]

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 \texttt or \ttfamily.

[Laurentius]

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]

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.

Code: Select all

Code, edit and compile here:

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\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
VA Ta\par
V{}A T{}a\par
V{\rule{.1pt}{\baselineskip}}A T{}a\par
V\kern0pt\relax A
\end{document}
 
 
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Run LaTeX here

I just learned that this method is not very reliable (especially with LuaTeX). Better here would be 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.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi Laurentius!

Mechanic glyphs have a fixed width, and there is no kerning based on specific combinations (as far as I know).

Interesting question. I remember with microtype we can switch off ligatures and specific kerning together by

Code: Select all

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\DisableLigatures{encoding=*}
 
 
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You can test it here - compare Ta with and without:

Code: Select all

Code, edit and compile here:

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\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage{blindtext}
\usepackage{microtype}
\DisableLigatures{encoding=*}
\begin{document}
Table
\end{document}
 
 
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Run LaTeX here

By default, a would be close to the T, under the top bar. After \DisableLigatures{encoding=*} that is gone.

Stefan

[Laurentius]

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.

[Johannes_B]

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

[Laurentius]

Many (good) typesetters actually removed parts of the metal block and hand-fitted it to another.

Do you mean that they had, say, may kinds of f for different combinations?

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.