Word Wrap in 1973
Charles Johnson
Fri Sep 10, 2004 at 8:44 am PDT • Views: 1,120
I mentioned this point about the Killian documents in our comments yesterday, but it deserves to be featured more prominently.
Anyone who ever used an IBM Selectric or a manual typewriter knows that when you reached the end of a typed line, you had to manually cause a “carriage return.” On electric typewriters you could push a button, but on manual machines you had to grab that lever and shove that carriage back to the left margin.
There was no such thing as automatic word-wrap.
So what are the odds that in these documents, supposedly typed by hand in 1972 and 1973, the line breaks would match exactly with a document typed into Microsoft Word, using Word’s default margins?
Answer: approaching absolute zero.
For reference, here again is my image where the original PDF document from the CBS News site is overlaid on my Microsoft Word document, showing the exact match of line spacing, line breaks, character spacing, and character forms:
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For verification purposes, and to show that I played no tricks with spacing or margins, here is the Microsoft Word document that I created.
Frank says: