Dear all,

I have been contacted by a Polish fellow, with a late family member whose profession was the forensic analysis of typewritten documents. This person passed away in 2020 and left behind in his heritage an archive of his forensic profession. This archive includes (among other things) dozens of typeface samples with the corresponding make and model. As the heir is not that much addicated to typewriters as the members of this forum are, I asked for permission to post a sample of these typeface specimens here. It was granted. Please find this sample over here: https://files.guelker.eu/misc/2022-04_T%2BWidla%2BTypewriting%2Bsamples.pdf

The inherited archive includes dozens of such document collections.

The file linked to above includes contact information. By all means, please contact this Polish individual at the e-mail address included in the PDF if you wish to preserve, digitise, or otherwise work with this fabulous finding. As of now, the archive is not digitised. This Polish fellow is unable to deal with this large amount of paper in order to preserve it for posterity, so he would be glad if someone can help him with preserval and/or analysis of all these documents.

In addition, I am sure the members of this forum would be quite eager to see how such an effort progresses, so please keep us updated if you contact him.
 

Fear not, the Internet Archive set out to rescue us. Here's a copy of the original article in the Internet Archive's wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20150106013530/http://scheong.wordpress.com/2012/12/27/buying-a-typewriter-what-you-need-to-know/

It takes quite long to load, but it does load eventually.
 

"Phil_F_NM" wrote:

Before you begin, make a light pencil mark on your page near the left side which corresponds to maybe 3cm from the bottom of the page, so you know how much room you have left?

I have tried this and it does work. Occasionally I find the space is too small, but it seems I make about the same number of footnotes on every page so I've now settled on an amount of space at the bottom that fits for me. The bottom marker idea was very helpful, thank you!

So what I now do is the following: I draw the footnote divider line at about 8 cm from the bottom (I have a lot of footnotes -- I work in Law, where this is custom; also it includes space if one or two footnotes get longer, usually it leaves me with about 1.5cm more space than needed) and then a small extra line at 1.5 cm from the bottom. When that line appears I know I am at the final line. If the footnote gets longer, I continue it on the next page as one can see occasionally in books.

"Laurenz van Gaalen" wrote:

If ease of use is important, consider to switch to endnotes.

I was effectively using endnotes before, but this does not work for me. The problem with my quite large amount of footnotes is that when I have finished the main text, I have forgotten what exactly should have gone at that specific footnote. So I needed to make a note (by hand, see above) for each footnote and then copy-typed the endnotes all in one go from my handwritten document. Since I type much faster than I write by hand, this slowed down my thinking process.

"Laurenz van Gaalen" wrote:

In that case yu can use a seperate typewriter for the endnotes.

I have not yet thought of using a separate typewriter. It is an interesting idea, but I would rather like not to do that. The space on my desk is limited and a typewriter already occupies quite a bit of that. Then I have the already typed pages next to it, my notes on the other side, another empty sheet for quick spontaneous thoughts that do not yet belong

Hi all!

So I write academic documents on my typewriter. For that, I need footnotes. Typing the raised number is pretty easy (I recommend using 1 1/2 spacing if you need footnotes), but the actual footnote text gives me some headache. Until now, I have been writing it out by hand on a separate sheet of paper, and then, when I've finished my current page, type it onto yet another sheet of paper. This duplicates work, but the alternative would be to roll up the page an arbitrary distance and hope that I never need to type a footnote text that is too long for the arbitary space chosen at the bottom of the page. Besides, I am bad at guessing and have had the paper ejected from the platen every now and when using this technique.

Does somebody have suggestions for a better approach?

Maybe a luxury problem as I finally scan the end-result anyway and process it with an OCR tool, because nowadays nobody accepts typoscripts anymore. But still...

You are right, I have "selective misalignment". Even if I type all lowercase, the letters appear misplaced. It might well be that type bars were bent over time and use. I was hoping that there is a simpler option than bending each affected type bar one by one, but from your answer I see that there is no other way. Specific tools I do not have, but I guess I will try with whatever I have at hand. I don't have much experience with repairing, but I can perfectly afford losing the machine (my main driver is an Olivetti Lettera 32, on which I would never conduct such an operation). This SM9 is not a rare individual machine, it pretty much has the normal German standard configuration.

Should I try bending the actual type bar itself, or rather one of the small bars in the mechanism leading up to the affected type bars in the segment?