laser-lovers@uw-beaver (07/05/85)
From: Richard Furuta <Furuta@WASHINGTON.arpa> 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 -------