"Randomly variable monospace font"

[schneeschmelze]

Dear David, thanks for your new package! I have just added it to my regular column about new packages on CTAN for the next issue of TeXnische Komödie. I think it's a nice idea to have it at hand, but I wonder whether simulating a typewriter as it used to be in the 1960s really would mean to have it typeset characters at a random quality? As far as I remember, typewriters used to produce a layout that was very much the same for each character you typed. E.g., every lower case e used to look the same because the lever in the typewriter that printed the character on the sheet of paper had a characteristically singular mechanics. This was so singular that even the police could recognise which typewriter was used to produce a particular letter etc. So, you might like to drop the idea of typesetting characters "at random" instead of making them unique one by one, in fact in order to reduce variety in output. Typewriters produced a move vivid layout, that's right, but not that lively, I'm afraid. ;) Cheers, Jürgen.

[davidcarlisle]

Yes I know:-)

Originally it was more or less a joke answer on tex.stackexchange (and a learning curve for me to see how far I could push run time lua into a luatex virtual font) but I had a few requests (and quite a few votes) so I decided to put it on ctan....

Actually it wouldn't be too hard to have an option to pull the random variable stuff outside the inner loop so that it generated variable offsets but then used those fixed values in the virtual font so that as you say, each letter had different offset and grey value but it wasn't changing each time.

I'll leave this open as a feature request and I may get back to that one day...

[schneeschmelze]

Too bad that it seems to be so complicated! ;) For most use cases the typewriter "joke" is absolutely sufficient and even convincing. ;) Anyway, thanks for your early reply!