Can TeX do ugly typesetting (with poor kerning)?

Question

This is from my series of questions "Can TeX do weird stuff?"

Today I want to know if TeX can simulate bad typography. I'm not talking about ugly templates, like wordlike or (god forgive me for this) abntex2, these are easy and not ugly enough.

I'm talking about nightmare-inducing poorly-kerned typography. I have seen lots of documents that the letters overlap each other and have irregular spacing, but could not find them for this question.

The closest thing I could find was (behold!) this:

and this:

I tried \letting and \deffing \kern and \glue to \relax and to a fixed amount, but none of these worked.

Is it possible to disable, or even better, completely messing up TeX's inter-letter spacing? Random inter-letter spacing would be perfect!

Answer 1

An approach with XeTeX and \XeTeXinterchartoks (i.e. compile the below with xelatex):

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\input{random}

\newcount\randnum
\newcommand{\randkern}{%
  \setrannum{\randnum}{-30}{30}%
  \kern \dimexpr(\randnum pt/10)\relax
}

\XeTeXinterchartokenstate = 1
\XeTeXinterchartoks 0 0 = {\randkern}

\begin{document}
\lipsum[1]
\end{document}

You can make the range smaller if you'd like less aggressive miskerning, e.g. changing {-30}{30} to {-10}{20} gives:

The idea is simply to insert a random kern between any two characters. For example, if we typed something like:

L\kern 0.4pt o\kern 1.3pt r\kern -1.0pt e\kern -0.4pt m

and so on, we'd have the result from the image above. The above code just does this, with two shortcuts:

• Defines a \randkern, using package random to generate random numbers, and the \dimexpr primitive introduced in e-TeX).
• Uses \XeTeXinterchartoks (documented in the XeTeX reference guide). Setting \XeTeXinterchartoks 0 0 to \randkern inserts the token \randkern between any two characters of class 0 (most characters are of class 0 by default). For example, when our text contains the character L followed by the character o, XeTeX treats it as if you had typed the token \randkern between them (like typing L\randkern o).

Answer 2

With LuaTeX, there’s a kerning callback provided, which we can use for exactly this purpose. There is no built-in equivalent of \XeTeXinterchartoks, but the appeal of LuaTeX is that a lot of such functionality we can implement ourselves, in Lua. We can get:

with (compile the below with lualatex)

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\directlua{dofile('randomkern.lua')}
\begin{document}
\lipsum[1]
\end{document}

where randomkern.lua is:

function rekern(head)
   local i = head
   while i~=nil do
      j = i.next
      -- Skip over discretionary (hyphen) nodes
      while j~=nil and node.type(j.id)=='disc' do
         j = j.next
      end
      -- Insert a kern node between successive glyph nodes
      if node.type(i.id)=='glyph' and j~=nil and node.type(j.id)=='glyph' then
         k = node.new(node.id('kern'))
         head, i = node.insert_after(head, i, k)
         assert(node.type(i.id)=='kern')
      end
      -- Tweak existing kerns (including ones we inserted) by a random amount
      if node.type(i.id)=='kern' then
         i.kern = i.kern + math.random(65536*-1, 65536*2)
      end
      i = i.next
   end
end

luatexbase.add_to_callback('kerning', rekern, 'Introduce random kern nodes')

The idea is that the kerning callback gets a list of nodes: for example,

  temp 
  local_par 
  hlist  indent {}
  glyph  L
  glyph  o
  glyph  r
  glyph  e
  glyph  m
  glue  <spaceskip: 218235 plus 109117^0 minus 72745^0>
  glyph  i
  glyph  p
  disc 
  glyph  s
  glyph  u
  glyph  m
  glue  <spaceskip: 218235 plus 109117^0 minus 72745^0>
  glyph  d
  glyph  o
  disc 
  glyph  l
  glyph  o
  glyph  r
  glue  <spaceskip: 218235 plus 109117^0 minus 72745^0>
  glyph  s
  glyph  i
  glyph  t

and so on. We simply traverse this list, and between every two consecutive glyph nodes (possibly with a disc node between them), we insert a kern node, and give it a random value. (TeX stores all dimensions (lengths, etc.) internally in scaled points, where 65536 sp = 1 pt.)

Note that this version handles hyphenation automatically: only the kerning changes; the set of valid hyphenation or line-break points remains the same.