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Whoops, put this on the wrong thread...

I have to leave in a little while (working a Bush-Cheney table at a function), but hope I can entrust some information to you in case it is needed later?

It looks like this proves the Selectric Composer can't get any larger than 12 pt and CAN'T do kerning... a few sentences later it states that kerning became available in WordPerfect in 1988.

Hope it helps :-)

"History of Word Processing"

"...A model of the Selectric Composer was soon fitted to read tapes created and corrected on the MT/ST. The machine calculated interword spaces, and it was thus necessary to type only once to achieve a justified output.Hyphenation during playback, though operator-assisted,was implemented for the first time. While the MagneticTape Selectric Composer was still very expensive for an office, and was limited to a maximum type size of 12 points, its input could be prepared by a secretary without the special training of a typesetter. It marked an important first step in the marriage of word processing and typeset-ting.’From early in the computer age, typesetters developed the hardware needed to use computer files as input.However, this was limited to letters, numbers, and punctu-ation; formatting, control of type face or size, and use of special characters were only possible if complex codeswere added to the computer files. The results could not bepreviewed on the computer, nor could the transferred files,once processed on the target hardware, be returned for further editing on the computer. The output devices were far too expensive for office or small business use.’ Production of typeset output on the microcomputer itself required an affordable output device with good resolution, speed, and print quality, the ability to handle avariety of type sizes and special characters, and the processing power to calculate microspacing needed to justify lines. The latter is the simplest: the program uses a table containing the widths of each character, calculates the total length of the letters in a line by adding the width of each, subtracting this from the desired line length(measure), and dividing the remainder by the number of interword spaces. The result is then sent to the printer as fractional spacing instructions. In addition, good typeset-ting requires kerning: removing space between selected pairs of letters to achieve a satisfying visual effect. Thisadded to the previous requirement the need to look up pairs of characters in a table and send fractional spacing adjustments to the printer between letters. Proportional spacing was partially implemented onCP/M machines, and fully adapted on both MS-DOS andMacintosh machines in the mid-1980s. Kerning was implemented with WordPerfect 5.0, in 1988. The output device of choice proved to be the laser printer. Daisy-wheel printers could handle proportional spacing, but not varying type sizes...."

http://users.ipfw.edu/jehle/deisenbe/compartics/History_of_Word_Processing.pdf