Truly Every Author is First Author: Equal-Width Superimposition by Minimising Visual Distortion
Abstract: In an earlier work, Demaine and Demaine propose that every author be a first author by superimposing all author names on the same spot of the title page. The construction is typographically unstable, because names have different natural widths. The superimposed block is ragged and the longest name dominates the visual mass, reintroducing exactly the ordering advantage the standard removes. We close this loophole. Each name is distorted by two knobs, a horizontal glyph scale and an inter-letter tracking, until all names occupy one common width $W$. We give a quadratic distortion model, solve the per-name trade-off in closed form by Lagrange multipliers, and show that the total-distortion optimal common width is a stiffness-weighted mean of the natural widths. We provide implementations as a $\LaTeX$ package and a Typst package, covering author blocks and bibliography entries alike; this paper typesets its own author block and its own reference with the former. Every proposition is machine-checked in Lean. The $\LaTeX$ and Typst packages, as well as the proofs, are available at https://github.com/MrP01/EveryAuthorIsFirstAuthor.