I’m trying to typeset “State and Revolution” in german and a lot of sources use a kind of double emphasis. E.g. marxists.org has cursive and bold and cursive. These seem to largely match up with the german translation from 1972 where there is cursive and c u r s i v e   w i t h   l a r g e   k e r n i n g. This makes the text very weird to read and there doesn’t seem to be a proper rhyme or reason to when super-emphasis is used.

If I compare this with the original I cannot make out any such emphasis, there seems to be l a r g e   k e r n i n g on some words, that might match up but
a) there doesn’t seem to be two types of emphasis
b) large kerning can often be an artifact of stretching the line to fit the block
c) I don’t know russian and can barely read cyrillic so maybe I’m I’m imagining things.

Not an original, if one has a link to one I would appreciate it. Or 1,500€, either will do…

Basically I would like to do away with the strong emphasis and just use one type of emphasis, cursive of course, like Knuth intended when he blessed us with T_EX, but would like someone to confirm whether there is a proper reason for this or if it’s present in the original before I do.

Posting in /c/theory because it’s about books or something I don’t know, I’ll let the mods sort it out.

Couldn’t find any such emphasis in any other translation, even an old 1926 doesn’t have it so it’s gone from “my” edition. Fairly sure it’s a weird choice the typesetter made that got copied and then spread. Goes to show how little technicalities like proper spacing between letters can make a great difference in how a text is interpreted and why proper typesetting is crucial.