Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "The correcting feature of typewriters is not what I thought" video.

IBM Selectrics were also often adapted for use as computer output devices. It was basically a matter of replacing the printing electronics that were driven by the keys, with circuits that could be driven by impulses from the computer.
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I wrote a Python script to manage it years ago. You give it the text and font, it measures the block and properly centres it both horizontally and vertically on the page.
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I would have scanned the form, used a typewriter font to overlay the text, then printed it back out again. How would they know?
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The current standard computer character code is Unicode, but the first 128 characters still embed the old ASCII code that was common before then. And of those, the first 32 are still called “control characters”, most of which have lost their function. But they still include control codes for both “horizontal tab” and “vertical tab”.
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It’s easy to do that kind of thing on a computer nowadays. By the way, the imperfections in typewriter output were sufficiently distinctive to particular typewriters to be almost like a fingerprint. This was well-known to people working in forensics back then.
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On more modern computer OSes we have the “compose” key. This lets us type multi-key mnemonics for all kinds of Unicode characters. For example, compose-lessthan-quote for an opening curly quote, like I did up there.
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@Kasiarzynka I can type all that on a US keyboard (which is what we use in NZ), and more besides, all with the Compose key.
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How about destroying unused pages on notepads? Because they can bear impressions of what was written on the sheets over them.
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0:55 I wrote a Python script to address envelopes years ago. Checking that Git repo, the first version was in 2016, last revision from early 2021. Only takes a minute or two when I need to use it, which is maybe once every month or two.
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