Line Squishing

The Shape of Days did a great job, with the help of an expert on the IBM Selectric Composer, of analyzing the questionable 60 Minutes documents now all over the Blogosphere.

With tremendous effort, he was able to reproduce very closely one of the documents except for the line widths. For some reason, the first line of each paragraph matched closely, but the second line did not:



Well, one explanation is that, as remarked here, word processors will automatically adjust the character spacing of lines: if they are the last line of a paragraph, word processors will expand the character spacing a bit more to make them more readable, since the space would be unused otherwise.

This is one possible explanation for why the black text from the "original" CBS document seems to take up more width on the second line of each paragraph: it was written with a word processor, whereas the red text was written on a typewritter which could not possibly know if it was on the last line of a paragraph or not.