Ink

The typewriter is the Underwood Rhythm Touch. Now here is the first draft, with the extra spaces marked at the ends of lines:

Transcribed below.

For most ordinary typing purposes, it just isn’t a good idea to right-justify text. But extraordinary situations do come up.

Let’s suppose you have to lay out your company newsletter with a typewriter, and let’s suppose you have to do it in right-justified columns. How would you go about it?

You’ll have to type it twice. The first time through, you type normally, making the right margin as even as you practically can. you choose an absolute maximum line length, But and when a line is shorter than that maximum, you fill in the rest of the spaces with some filler character like the ¢ sign—some easily distinguished character that’s not going to be confused with the end of a word.

Those marks will tell you how many extra spaces you’ll have to distribute through the line the second time you type it.

The results aren’t perfect. Some obsessive typists would use half-spacing to make the extra spaces come out more perfectly even, but most would consider an extra whole space here and there good enough.