How can I reproduce the bill of rights in LaTeX?

Question

Though some might disagree, I think the Bill of Rights is a beautiful piece of typography.

I would like to reproduce this using TeX and friends, but have no idea where to start. How, for example, would I reproduce the beautiful g with the extra swash? Would I have to create the glyph myself, or are there such fonts available?

Also, is there a package that makes it possible to get the proper typesetting of "Article the first .... Text here"?

Answer 1

^{Attention: this is a failed attempt. Feel free to not upvote it. :)}

Since you mentioned about reproducing the Bill of Rights, I thought it would be interesting to come up with a TeX example as close as possible as the original. But, oh boy, it was hard for me. And - spoiler alert - I failed miserably. On the other hand, I think it be worthy mentioning my method. :)

We are talking here about a calligraphical font. To get the beautiful g, we need to choose a font which provides this feature (see How is the effect (swash) achieved?). Once we have this font, we only need to use it. Engines like LuaTeX and XeTeX are great with dealing with system fonts.

Now, I really don't know any font which is similar to the title of the Bill of Rights. When everything fails, time to use some brute force. :)

My plan, initially: how about coming up with my own font? (see What is the most appropriate tool to develop a new font for LaTeX?) Looks like a crazy idea: I'm in! :)

First of all, I had to copy the countours of the title. To be honest, I was just looking for specific letters, so it wouldn't be necessary to map all glyphs to their "positions" in the font file. I lost half an hour to reach this:

^{My soundtrack while tracing the title. :)}

So far, so good. Now, time to travel to the unknown land of font creation. I opened FontForge and imported all the letters I extracted to their corresponding glyphs. The letters: B, i, l, o, f, R, g, h, t, s.

It was my first interaction with FontForge - quite traumatic, I'd say. :) I managed to import all the letters and fixed some errors. Creating your own font is hard! You need to adjust the kerning, scaling, etc. I was not ready for that hurricane of information. :) FontForge did its best to help me, though. Then I exported the file to an OpenType Font format - .otf. Let's see how my BillOfRights.otf looks like:

Yikes. I really failed with font settings. Surprisingly, I managed to get at least some letters into their correct display. :) Anyway, as a proof of concept, I tried a sample TeX file with LuaTeX, as provided by Khaled Hosny in luaotfload: how to use font in current directory?:

\input luaotfload.sty
\directlua{fonts.names.scan(".")}
\font\test={name:BillOfRights}
\test Bill of Rights
\bye

My output:

The Rights part didn't appear. Probably some error in the font. Nevertheless, I was closer than I thought. In any case, I decided to export my attempt to PSTricks. Here's the code (the SE framework doesn't allow entries with more than 30k characters, so I'm relying on GitHub), run it with XeLaTeX.

The output:

Moral of the story: It is possible to reproduce (very near to 1:1) the Bill of Rights, provided that we have time - and patience - to play with. :)

Answer 2

@Paulo Cereda's answer is really cool. I would like to propose a change in one of the steps. Doing the countours by hand can be very time consuming (Paulo took half an hour). @Werner gave a very good solution to automatize this task. I reproduced the title and it took me 30 secs. He proposes to use either potrace or autotrace. I found that potrace does a better job. They have precomplied distributions for several OSs. Here is the input image:

Following this simple command:

potrace Bill.bmp -b PDF -o Bill.pdf

Go to the original answer for better details. Here is the output in PDF (It supports also SVG,EPS,PS, etc..):

You can either exploit the file to later import each letter to a glyph in FontForge or you can just input the PDF to your final document.

Answer 3

I once reproduced a 19th-century advertisement in LaTeX, as mentioned in my answer to the question on examples of beautiful typography.

The procedure I used was something along the following lines:

1. Determine the dimensions of the original printed document and use the geometry package to set the correct page size and margins.
2. Get a good, high-resolution, unskewed and unwarped scan of the entire page of the original printed document and underlay it, using its full width and height, in your LaTeX document for tracing. For this you can use the graphicx and eso-pic packages.
3. Find matching fonts for the headlines and body. You can do this using any number of free online font-matching websites. (In my case, I was lucky that the advertisement I was reproducing used something very close to the default Computer Modern.) If necessary, get a copy of the font (or fonts) and set it (or them) up for use with LaTeX. (Using fontspec with XeLaTeX might be an easier option.)
4. For titles with fancy swashes and whatnot for which you can't find a digital font, trace that portion of the original scan using potrace or some other bitmap-to-vector tool. Add the resulting PDF to your document using \includegraphics (suitably positioned with \vspace and \hspace).
5. Start typing the text from the original document (or copy and paste it, if you've got it OCR'd) into LaTeX, manually inserting linebreaks with \newline for ragged-right documents or \linebreak for justified ones. Periodically compile and view the document and observe how closely your version lines up with the background scan. Adjust the font size and spacing (e.g., via \openup) as necessary. If the original document contains complex formatting such as columns or tables, you will need to reproduce these using the corresponding LaTeX packages/commands.
6. When you are done setting the text, remove or comment out the background scan you added in Step 2.
7. Most likely the original document was printed on textured paper. If you want to reproduce this as well, then look for a blank area in the original document scan, copy it into a bitmap image editor, and make it tileable. (There are plenty of online tutorials for this.) If there aren't any blank areas big enough to do this, then try to find some other document with similar paper texture that you can use. The tileable version can then be underlaid on your LaTeX document using the wallpaper package.

You can see the source code for my own reproduction in which most of the steps above are evident.