TeX typesetting

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A place to share ideas, resources, tips, and hacks for Donald Knuths typesetting software TeX. All variants and formats like OpTeX, LaTeX and ConTeXt are welcome.

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What font is good for ransom letters? The wordlike.sty pkg gives problems (lemmy.sdf.org)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by evenwicht@lemmy.sdf.org to c/tex_typesetting@lemmy.sdf.org

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Suppose you’re writing an anonymous letter. Nice looking LaTeX fonts would be a bad choice because they stand out and create quite a bit of uniqueness. I figure MS Word is probably the most popular. So I had a look at the wordlike package. It’s dated 2006 and gives an error on this line:

\renewcommand{\@dotsep}{1}

To hack around it, I tried putting this in my preamble:

\makeatletter
\newcommand{\@dotsep}{1} % hack to avoid wordlike.sty error
\makeatother

That attempt at a hack has no effect. Any ideas?

Regarding the click bait title.. I have not yet had the need for making ransom demands which should probably use a genuine MS Word. But whistle blowing should be quasi-pseudo-anonymous to some extent. I thought wordlike would suffice. Of course I’m open to other approaches. Maybe just switching to a sans serif font would do.

The last answer on this page looks interesting but does not work with pdflatex.. only XeTex. There is another non-wordlike approach on this page I might play with.

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[–] evenwicht@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I would of course frame some poor sucker by using their color Canon printer. I think all the Canons have the yellow tracker dots.

Otherwise a black Samsung or Oki would perhaps be safest.

BTW, why do you mention laser printers specifically? AFAIK the trackers are generally with yellow pigment, and most laser printers are not color.

[–] bremen15@feddit.org 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

is it only yellow dots? I would have guessed that black-and-white printers use single black dots in patterns, which would be invisible for most intents and purposes, too.

[–] Quexotic 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

It's "to track counterfeiters" supposedly. Only color printers should have tracking dots, but my paranoia doesn't trust that my b/w printer doesn't have tracker dots.

[–] evenwicht@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

I’m not sure why you would regard black dots as invisible.

The EFF warned that no printers are safe (or something to that effect), as they gave up on the project to document the models with tracker dots. I suppose the question is: have any black laser printers been concretely identified as having tracker dots?

In any case, I think mono printers are safer simply because there is no legit cover story for that surveillance. So if someone gets caught doing something naughty, there would be a more reluctance to use the evidence if it reveals mono printers are compromised. A mono printer maker would have no defense for their anti-consumer design.