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Thomas Phinney, Font Detective[2] is the first person I'd ask, as he's done this professionally, though I have done a bit of it myself.
Remember, there were people scraping the Internet looking for things that were posted that might indicate someone was a time traveler?
Maybe Dennis Ritchie was given some advanced information and given access to advanced technology (US security service that someone else mentioned)?
Something fun to think about.
> It appears that Dennis was able to replace incorrect copy with new text in the surrounding original copy, but note the extra space in the corrected version. Other than corrections, the January and February versions are identical in every way: February is not a new version, but a copy of the January draft except for corrections. ... The natural explanation is that he used white-out and a Xerox copy machine. Except t…
I agree with the other comment here that the authors haven't used a typewriter, or at least in enough detail to know that on many if not all of them, holding down the spacebar will advance the carriage by half a character (and releasing it, in normal use, advances the other half.)
"The braces are not perfect— clearly they have been done by hand—but they are very precise" There were plastic template stencils/rulers that let you draw great looking braces.
The reason there are two versions of "4" is because you could type something like "(4.10)" with either the regular typeball or the Symbols ball. Both have numbers, parentheses, upper case letters, and a period/decimal point. Switching typeballs takes a few seconds, so it's only done when necessary.
There was a little lever on some Selectrics which displaced the carriage horizontally by half a space.[2] So, if you really needed half spacing, it was available. But you had to hold the spring-loaded lever in place while typing, so this was rarely used. It was used for fixing typos by erasing two characters and squeezing in three. It was also possible to move the paper a half-line vertically.
This is tedious work, and there were pro typists who did it for money. This was a manual job.
All this is on Google.
[1] https://www.duxburysystems.org/downloads/library/texas/apple...
Chemical diagrams, graphs, and equations, were all done by hand.
Theses were shorter.
For sake of reference, in the 1950s my parents both took their theses to a typist, which was the standard operating procedure. You could do it yourself, but multiple copies were needed, and only a typist could do it accurately enough to trust themselves with carbon paper. Correcting mistakes on carbons was a mess. Chemical diagrams, graphs, and equations, were all done by hand. Theses were shorter.
This is a non-mystery. It looks like this was done with a Selectric typewriter using two typeballs, one of them "Symbols 10", and the other for text.[1] The reason there are two versions of "4" is because you could type something like "(4.10)" with either the regular typeball or the Symbols ball. Both have numbers, parentheses, upper case letters, and a period/decimal point. Switching typeballs takes a few seconds, s…
After a bit of practice, it was remarkably quick for doing equations. It used its own font, that looked like a mono-spaced Times Roman.