The Mac still isn’t a typewriter

For most of the 1980s and 1990s I was an Apple Macintosh user. I chose a Mac because of its elegance and its ability to produce beautiful print documents.

When I got my first Mac, Windows and IBM PC computers were still in the text-only dark ages.

Early Macs had another advantage. They came with solid keyboards able to take a pounding.

I certainly gave mine a pounding. Like most journalists in those days I learnt touch-typing on manual typewriters – hammering out words on slips of paper.

Like a typewriter, not a typewriter

My Mac was typewriter-like, but it followed a different set of rules to any typewriter.

I needed a guidebook to get the most from my new tool and found Robin Williams’ excellent The Mac is not a Typewriter (ISBN: 0938151312).

The explained how to use the computer to make great-looking documents. Some tips, like not typing two spaces after a sentence, were obvious. Others were less so.

Dated

The book has dated. Parts of its content are no longer important. And some of its lessons are now second-nature to experienced computer typists.

Yet you’ll still get value from reading the book – if you can find a copy – because while we may not print as many documents as we did in the 1990s, we still create documents. And making them look good can be as important.

For example, there’s a section explaining why, most of the time, you shouldn’t use justified text. It is harder to read and large blocks of white space – known in the business as rivers – appear. They are ugly and distracting, yet you see them everywhere in PDFs and on websites.

The book predates the iPad. While Apple’s tablet is not a typewriter in the same way a Mac is not a typewriter, it is possible to get more of the old school typewriter feel on an iPad. Perhaps there is a book in that.