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From: laser-lovers@uw-beaver
Newsgroups: fa.laser-lovers
Subject: How do you identify the producers?
Message-ID: <1354@uw-beaver>
Date: Fri, 5-Jul-85 01:17:50 EDT
Article-I.D.: uw-beave.1354
Posted: Fri Jul  5 01:17:50 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 1-Jul-85 05:54:22 EDT
Sender: daemon@uw-beaver
Organization: U of Washington Computer Science
Lines: 27

From: Richard Furuta 

A while back during another discussion, Brian Reid dropped an aside
saying that he could usually determine what printer and what formatter
produced a particular piece of output.  Well, as fate would have it, I
recently found myself carefully examining the typography of the
different papers printed in a conference proceedings.

Well, I learned a number of interesting things.  I learned that TeX
and the Computer Modern fonts have made quite a splash---most of the
papers in this proceedings use some version of the Computer Modern
fonts and many seem to also have been formatted with TeX, although
some showed strong signs of having been produced by troff.  I had a
generally jolly time inspecting the letter spacing and looking for the
presence or absence of ligatures, kerning, and hyphenation.

At the end of the exercise, I had a pretty strong hypothesis about
what formatter had been used to produce each paper and a somewhat less
strong hypothesis about what printer was used.

The reason I bring this all up is that I'd like to hear from the
readership what evidence and heuristics you use when deciding what
formatter and printer was used in producing a particular document.
What do you see as being the tell-tale signs?

					--Rick
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