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To: dickmc

Awesome work, my man! Hat tip.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned yet is the centering of the top 3 lines. I remember from beginning typing class what it took to manually center 3 lines at the top of the page. You had to count all the characters and spaces (Correct me if I'm wrong, but I count 34, 15, and 20 spaces for the 3 header lines). You then divide the number of spaces by 2, dropping the remainder. This would get you 17, 7, and 10. Then you put the carriage at the center position (space 42 on a 8.5 inch sheet of paper using pica type), then BACKSPACE one by one, like 17 times, to know where to start typing "111th...." Repeat the BACKSPACE exercise for lines 2 & 3.

How could Jerry Killian, who "couldn't type," or "never typed," actually be able to properly CENTER the top 3 lines using a typewriter? Would Killian actually gone to that much trouble to center them? Most likely he would have used the left margin, as was much more in practice. That was called BLOCK style formatting, as I remember. MODIFIED BLOCK used the center point (space 42) but all such lines (usually the Inside Address/Date and the Closing) used a left margin of space 42, not centered on space 42.

Also, if typed on a typewriter, and manually centered, the 2nd line, which had an "odd" number of characters, would be "off center" with the 1st line and the 3rd line of the headers, which each had an "even" number of characters, right?


19 posted on 09/20/2004 3:16:42 PM PDT by goldeneagle316
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To: goldeneagle316
I count 34, 15, and 20 spaces for the 3 header lines). You then divide the number of spaces by 2, dropping the remainder.
Notice that a centered line with an odd number of characters could not be possibly be aligned perfectly with a "centered" line with an even number of characters. There being no way to account for the truncation error in the strictly integer number of spaces.

It also must be said that prior to the advent of word processing professionals left the typing strictly to secretarial help because typing clear (mistake-free) copy was a specialized skill. And, probably, an underpaid one.


25 posted on 09/20/2004 6:53:42 PM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion (The idea around which liberalism coheres is that NOTHING actually matters but PR.)
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