[Oztrich Boy]

The 3-line centered heading is curious to me

I wondered about that too.

[RightField]

It is hot too difficult to manually center lines using an old proportional typewriter. As a typist, you would know the pica or width value of each letter. A lower-case 'm' for instance, might be worth 5, while a lower-case 't' might be worth 2. As I recall, the widest of all letters on the old IBM Executives was 7 (upper case W).

Then it's just a matter of totalling the value of each letter, adding an average of 3 picas between each word, dividing by 2, finding the center point, backspacing the required number of units, and then typing the line. The typist had the freedom to add or subtract units between words (or even units between letters in a word) so as to make an individual line or word come out "right." I have done this exercise hundreds, if not thousands, of times, in my old life as a "repro" typist in the 1970's.

On other thing, the 'backspace' key on these typewriters moved the platen back just 1 unit. I.e., to backspace over an 'm' would take 5 strokes, over a 't' would take 3 strokes.

All of this is just to say that I am becoming convinced the Killian document is a forgery. While it is definitely possible to manually center individual typewritten lines, it seems implausible to me that such lines typed 30+ years ago would somehow exactly duplicate the same exercise of today's word processors.

Sorry to be so long winded.

[cookcounty]

PBS' Lehrer is about to do a segment on this in a few minutes.....