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Nothing about his thesis suggests that it was done using anything except a typewriter and some engineering (drafting)stencils in common use at the time. Typewri
by K0balt 4y ago
Nothing about his thesis suggests that it was done using anything except a typewriter and some engineering (drafting)stencils in common use at the time. Typewriters are capable of arbitrary character alignment (and even rotation with clever abuse of the paper) and engineering stencils were in common usage for all common symbolic figures.
I have produced documents with similar and more complex features using those tools, and Ritchie’s accuracy, although more than sufficient, is unremarkable for someone adept with those tools.
In the analog world, the mechanical and repetitive default spacing of the typewriter was the intrusion, not the ontological rule.
The re-production of the document in its various iterations is remarkable, but consistent with using a layout table (written notes of calculated alignments). It was a common method used to calculate the original spacing for awkward or critical text. You couldn’t just type something and then move it, so you would work it out ahead of time before typing. If you were smart or experienced you would note these calculations as a list of alignments so you could reuse them when you inevitably had to start over. There is no reason to suspect that these alignment notes would not have been reused and iterated upon.
He might easily have done this himself, and certainly would not have found it difficult to find someone with the skills to do so. The fact that most people didn’t bother speaks more to the perceived importance of doing so rather than the physical capability to produce the work artfully using common tools.
He either considered it important to do it somewhat artfully or someone helping him did. It’s no more complex than that.
- lelandfe 4y agoNot for nothing, but your dismissal here is tantamount to refuting the core thrust of this paper: > What is important is the actual work product, which from a typographic perspective is vastly superior to most other math dissertations of the period. They spend much of the paper attempting to figure out how this would have been typeset. I don’t think the product is quite as trivial as your comment paints it to be, at least. They ask relevant questions in the “Conclusion” section, unaddressed by your remarks. > How did he (or some typist) manage to sustain such precision for 180 pages, with endless sequences of sub- scripts on superscripts? How did he manage the fractional spacing, especially horizontally, where so far as we know, the devices of the day did not provide a mechanism.
- LudwigNagasena 4y agoOP didn’t say “trivial”. They said “unremarkable for someone adept with those tools” and “most people didn’t bother”.
- lelandfe 4y agoWe are lucky I did not claim they said “trivial,” then, hey? But sure. That’s still exactly opposite the paper’s claim. They couldn’t find another paper exhibiting those qualities, which they should have were it unremarkable.
- Arch-TK 4y agoThese days LaTeX seems like an obvious choice for a thesis, yet lots of people still use Microsoft Word. It doesn't seem too suspicious that if it was several orders of magnitude harder to use LaTeX then almost nobody, except a handful or even one of the most dedicated people would use it.
- Maursault 4y ago> Nothing about his thesis suggests that it was done using anything except a typewriter The repeated and consistent precision is simply not possible with a typewriter alone. I suspect some elements were created with a typewriter, but not most of it.
- noisy_boy 4y agoMaybe he modified a typewriter to allow manual control and precision, probably specifically changes focused towards his goals. A typewriter would have been easily available, access to tools would have been easy considering the prestigious university he was part of and finally, he definitely had the brain power to do something like that. E.g. maybe he had multiple Selectric balls made to allow superscript/subscripts/symbols and changed them to accomplish different "levels" of a line.