[FairWitness]

In all fairness, back in the stone ages we used to center on mechanical typewriters all the time. It's just that the typist did the math rather than having the computer figure it out. :-)

I recall doing that, but I also remeber it worked out if you had an even number of letters in the line but not for an odd number of letters.

[RightField]

An odd number of 'picas' only needs one tiny pica to make it an even number. On a proportional typewriter, that one pica can be easily placed unnoticeably between two words. Old repro typists knew which letters were better at masking such practices. People don't even notice now, but the only way that any text is right-hand justified is by adding or subtracting spaces between words.

[alnick]

I recall doing that, but I also remeber it worked out if you had an even number of letters in the line but not for an odd number of letters.

That's right, and one of the lines in the above example had an odd number of spaces. Also, it just occurred to me that with a proportional font, the little trick we used to use to center a line becomes much, much more complicated.