Photocomposing machine and font strip therefor for kerned characters

摘要

A photocomposing machine and font strip therefor are described which allow type designers to have the flexibility to design typographical characters which are kerned. The photocomposing machine is able to automatically kern those characters which are designed to be kerned. The automatic kerning is accomplished by intentionally offsetting each character's placement on the font strip to the left with respect to the machine's aperture, and providing an optical system in the photocomposing machine which intentionally offsets the projection of the font strip through the aperture of the machine to the right, thereby cancelling the offset of unkerned characters. Kerned characters are placed to the right on the font strip in order to allow the machine's optical system offset to overlap the image of kerned characters on the space normally reserved for the next character.