LaTeX does an outstanding job in typesetting things perfectly (as if that needed to be said yet one more time…).
Now, I'd like to introduce certain imperfections to my text to make it look like it has been typed up with an old typewriter – spots, lines, missing "blackness" (eg. running out of ink), jaggedness of characters, some of them being a little bold while others are a little faint, characters "dancing around" (ie. not being totally straight on one line) and so on.
Using "typewriter" fonts does an ok job, but the imperfections are always the same – eg. every letter e is always more bold then others, every letter o has a little dot in it and so on. This is not what I seek, but rather introduce a certain randomness of these variations and imperfections with every typeset-run I go through.
I have looked at this example, but the output is still very nicely, evenly typeset and there is no variation to each letter.
This Cthulu worshipper is looking for a crazy typeset – yet the typeset is the same every time and it, again, relies heavily on certain fonts.
Here's a small list of images I found online that might give you an idea of what the output is supposed to look like:
– An old typewriter page
– Another page, with the model of the typewriter used stated
– Even wikipedia has an example, and having typewriter sounds on the page makes me feel very old
Before you feel you have to ask: Why would I want this? – Well, I just recently got interested in the brave RetroBSD community and started liking vintage IT stuff – so now the next step would be to reproduce (on todays high quality printers) the imperfections of yesterdays printers, maybe even going back to the daisy wheel time or the time of manual typewriter usage. If someone reading this happens to know where I can find a vintage VT100 dumb terminal…. 😉
Best Answer
Once you find the set of parameters to do the desired effect, you can automatize this by creating a script, that will process the pdf files you have created with LaTeX.