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Are there fonts out there, that have small degree of variation from letter to letter? In some older books, some letters were corrected by hand, and that produced a rather curious effect, and added a human touch to the work. I was wandering if there is anything like this?

It would be great if it was an open type font like Linux Libertine, but that is a separate question.

Andriy Drozdyuk
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    I don't quite understanding your question. Whatever font it is, the same letter always results in some glyph shape (mostly). If you mean things like in Gutenberg biber, where each letterforms has several variations depending on if it appears on the head of line or othe places,etc. I don't think there is such subtle fonts. However modern opentype fonts do have the contextual substitution features, for example contextual ligature is one of them. In this case, there is the Zapfino, which is really dynamic. But you won't want set regular text with it. – Yan Zhou May 06 '12 at 23:38
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    Perhaps this would be of interest: How do I make my document look like it was written by a Cthulhu-worshipping madman? – Werner May 07 '12 at 05:36
  • @YanZhou What I was thinking is even more random, than simple variations on the letterforms depending on their position. The Beowulf font has the meat of it int he description "When printed, each point in each letter in every word on the page would move randomly, giving the letters a shaken, distraught appearance..." provided in answer by Ulrich below. – Andriy Drozdyuk May 07 '12 at 10:49
  • @Werner Yet every glyph for the given letter is identical. – Andriy Drozdyuk May 07 '12 at 13:57

3 Answers3

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I see there is an OpenType version of Knuth's Punk font (where the original variability was coded in MetaFont) http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/punknova

David Carlisle
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  • Thanks... haha! but that font is just horrendous... I was kind of hoping for something I could use :-) By the way, for those who are interested, the "randomness" works simply by generating a bunch of glyphs for each character ahead of time, and letting open type choose one of those "at random". – Andriy Drozdyuk May 07 '12 at 13:54
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FF Beowolf promises to do something like this. How well this works, I don't know. (Twenty years back, when I first saw the ads, it depended on having a sufficiently clueful PostScript interpreter, but the new version is OpenType.)

Ulrich Schwarz
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  • This looks like what I am looking for. Does this work for on-screen display though? – Andriy Drozdyuk May 07 '12 at 10:50
  • Lol, their description of it is sure is entertaining: "Each glyph in each font has ten alternates and a massive Faustian brain to control the mayhem." It does seem, like it is not truly random anymore - and they had to settle on a limited number of variations. Cool link though, thanks! – Andriy Drozdyuk May 07 '12 at 10:52
  • I think the original postscript version would really randomly wiggle certain control points by a small amount, but then, as now, I'd not spend that kind of money on it. – Ulrich Schwarz May 07 '12 at 12:46
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The free Playpen Sans font from TypeTogether does this:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{fontspec,lipsum}
\setmainfont{Playpen Sans}[
  Contextuals=Alternate,
  StylisticSet=1]
\begin{document}
\lipsum[1]
\end{document}

output of MWE

Compare the first and second e in “consectetuer,” and the a in “ac” with that in “adipiscing,” for example.

Thérèse
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