# typesetting in the style of Turing's famous “ON COMPUTABLE NUMBERS”

Maybe an unusual question but I love the typographical style of this text.

http://classes.soe.ucsc.edu/cmps210/Winter11/Papers/turing-1936.pdf

I am an art student writing a research paper. I would love to be able to present it in the style of Turing's famous text.

Is there a \documentclass{} that will approximate the style used in this paper.

Thanks Rob

-
You need to sort out what font is needed. That is the hardest part --- unless, that is, you need to typeset the exact same maths in the exact same way. You could easily replicate headers with fancyhdr, footnotes with footmisc, and sectional divisions with titlesec; in fact, some of the more feature rich classes like memoir and KOMA-Script will get you pretty far along on their own. Note however that TeX will do a much 'better' (read: tighter) job with interword spacing by default. –  jon Aug 28 '13 at 2:10
WhatTheFont can be used to identify fonts. –  Mars Aug 28 '13 at 4:50
@GonzaloMedina It seems to me that the font used is not Times. My guess is that, being the document scanned, the font properties are filled in the with default system font values (times for serif, helvetica for sans serif, courier for monospaced). I would follow Mars advice to identify the font... –  guillem Aug 28 '13 at 5:35
beautiful tables :) –  morbusg Aug 28 '13 at 10:15
This is one of the many knock-offs of the Century family of typefaces. Currently available are New Century Schoolbook and Monotype's Century MT. Computer Modern, if memory serves, was based on a Century typeface, so CM math should harmonize. I think that somewhere on CTAN there is a version of New Century Schoolbook to be had. The match won't be exact, but you will capture the flavor of the original. –  sgmoye Aug 28 '13 at 19:58

This can give you a starting point:

\begin{filecontents*}{examplexyz.bib}
@article{alonzo,
title={An Unsolvable Problem of Elementary Number Theory},
author={Alonzo Church},
journal={American Journal of Mathematics},
volume={58},
number={2},
month={April},
year={1936},
pages={345-363}
}

\end{filecontents*}

\documentclass[12pt,twoside]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[paperwidth=6.27in,paperheight=9.69in,centering]{geometry}
\usepackage[style=authoryear]{biblatex}
\usepackage[symbol*,bottom]{footmisc}
\usepackage[pagestyles]{titlesec}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{amssymb}
\usepackage{array}
\usepackage{fouriernc}
\usepackage{lipsum}

\newpagestyle{mypstyle}{
\setfoot[][][]{}{}{}
}
\pagestyle{mypstyle}

\DefineFNsymbols*{mystyle}{{$\dagger$}{$\ddagger$}\S\P\|%
*{**}{$\dagger\dagger$}{$\ddagger\ddagger$}}

\setfnsymbol{mystyle}

\newcommand\periodafter[1]{#1.}
\titleformat{\section}
{\normalfont\filcenter}{\thesection.}{0.5em}{\itshape\periodafter}

\title{On computable numbers, with an application to the  entscheidungsproblem}
\author{A. M. Turing}

\makeatletter
\def\Title{On computable numbers.}
\let\Author\@author
\renewcommand\footnoterule{%
\kern-3\p@
\hrule
\kern2.6\p@}
\def\@maketitle{%
\newpage
\begin{center}%
\let \footnote \thanks
{\MakeUppercase{\@title}\par}%
\vskip 1.7em%
{\lineskip .5em%
\begin{tabular}[t]{c}%
\textit{By}~\@author
\end{tabular}\par}%
\vskip 0.8em%
{\footnotesize\@date}%
\end{center}%
\par
\vskip 0.5em%
}
\makeatother

\begin{document}
\maketitle

\section{Computing machines}
\lipsum[4]\lipsum[4]
Test text\footfullcite{alonzo}
\lipsum[4]
The machine is to have the four $m$-configurations, $\mathfrak b$'', $\mathfrak c$'', $\mathfrak k$'', $\mathfrak e$'' and is capable of printing $0$'' and $1$''. The process of printing this $1$ will be called marking $\beta$ (or $S$) with $a$.
$\lambda w \biggl[ \{W_\gamma\} \bigl(\bigl\{\{Q\}(W_\gamma)\bigr\} (w)\bigr)\biggr]$
\lipsum*[2]
\begin{center}
\renewcommand\arraystretch{1.5}
\begin{tabular}{>{$}c<{$}>{None}c*{2}{>{$}c<{$}}}
\multicolumn{2}{c}{\itshape Configuration} &
\multicolumn{2}{c}{\itshape Behaviour} \\
\multicolumn{1}{c}{\itshape $m$-config.} &
\multicolumn{1}{c}{\itshape symbols} &
\multicolumn{1}{c}{\itshape operations} &
\multicolumn{1}{c}{\itshape final $m$-config.} \\
\mathfrak b & & P0,R & \mathfrak c \\
\mathfrak c & & R & \mathfrak e \\
\mathfrak e & & P1,R & \mathfrak k \\
\mathfrak k & & R & \mathfrak b
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\lipsum[2-4]

\end{document}


An image of the resulting document:

• The geometry package was used to produce the paper dimensions used in the article: 6.27inx9.69in; the centering option was used to produce equal values for the margins in twoside.

• The titlesec package was used to customise the format for section titles; a similar job can be done for other sectional units.

• The pagestyles option for titlesec was used to produce a pagestyle having headers as in the original documents; this could have also been done using fancyhdr.

• biblatex and its \footfullcite commands were used to produce the full citations as footnotes.

• I used the footmisc package with the symbol option; this, together with the use of \DefineFNsymbols allows you to define the set of symbols that yu want to be applied to footnote markers.

• I redefined \footnoterule so that the rule separating text from footnotes spans the whole text width.

• I also redefined \@maketitle to emulate the style of the title information. Another option here, would be to use the titling package.

• I defined some auxiliary commands \Title and \Author to have the author and (part of the) title in the headers.

• In a comment to the question, sgmoye identified the font as pertaining to the Century family of typefaces. According to the LaTeX Font Catalogue, the fouriernc package provides support for New Century Schoolbook for LaTeX. The following uses this package; as sgmoye warns, "the matching to the original is not exact, but captures the flavour of the original".

• After a suggestion by barbara beeton, I added some elements from the original document (a bit of maths and one of the tables), to show the blend between text and math fonts. barbara beeton kindly provided the math expressions.

-
Gonzalo, You too get tired? I don't believe it ;-) –  Harish Kumar Aug 28 '13 at 4:04
this does look nice, but it's not the same font. the "e"s are all wrong. the article from proc. london math. society was puclished in 1937, almost certainly with a monotype font. the details of the letters that i checked are consistent with those of the font on which computer modern was based -- monotype modern series 8a -- although all the letters are consistently narrower than 8a. if someone can find a monotype font catalog from that era (preferably a british/european version), identification should be fairly straightforward. –  barbara beeton Aug 28 '13 at 14:23
@barbarabeeton yes; the fonts are not the same; last night I misread the information from the menu "Properties" and that's why I ended up using the "dreadful" Times/Helvetic/Courier combo. In my updated answer I suggested What the Font (the Forum, since I used their on line application with no joy) to help identifying the precise font. –  Gonzalo Medina Aug 28 '13 at 19:32
@GonzaloMedina -- a friend found this on line for me -- a scanned copy of the monotype font book, at (donblack.ca/Monotype/MonotypeSpecimenBook.pdf). it's 700+ pages, so it takes a while to download. monotype series 1A and 4A look promising (i'm printing those pages out to do some measuring); they're very like 8A (the model for computer modern) except that they're narrower. (blessings on whoever allowed this invaluable book to be scanned!) –  barbara beeton Aug 28 '13 at 21:26
@Gonzalo -- the more i think about it, the more i think this sample should have at least a few bits of math. so here's my offering. The machine is to have the four $m$-configurations, \lduot$\mathfrak b$\rdquot, \ldquot$\mathfrak c$\rdquot, \ldquot$\mathfrak k$\rdquot, \ldquot$\mathfrak e$\rdquot and is capable of printing \ldquot$0$\rdquot and \ldquot$1$\rdquot. The process of printing this $1$ will be called marking $\beta$ (or $S$) with $a$. $\lambda w \biggl[ \{W_\gamma\} \bigl(\bigl\{\{Q\}(W_\gamma)\bigr\} (w)\bigr)\biggr]$ (pardon the "quotes"; markdown is tough on them.) –  barbara beeton Aug 29 '13 at 16:47

I don't have such a template. I see couple things that should be done when writing the article, and IMHO it is too much to be just a comment.

1. Notice that § (coded as \S) stands for "section" and §§ (coded as \S\S) stands for "sections", as was usual back then.

2. The quotation marks are badly-spaced, and they should be written as {} and '{}' or with the appropriate ligatures disabled (this is possible via fontspec in XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX).

3. To simulate the effect of non-uniform letters, you can use \usepackage[stretch=70]{microtype}, which will allow the font to stretch and shrink from line to line, creating such an effect.

-