ANSTHRLD - Forms

[Timothy A. McDaniel]

Etienne wrote:
> The rumor is that the online forms will not actually be
> accepted by kingdom, even though they are online, because they
> seem a little reduced.

Good thing I wasn't drinking anything at the time I read that.
You woulda owed me a keyboard.

That's a truly staggering myth.  Please stomp it out ASAP.

The forms are looked at by humans, who are notoriously bad at
being living micrometers.  Well, except for scanning the
miniemblazon, but it's hard enough just getting that to be
upright, and even then the mini is only used to print on the ILoI
and LoI for -- tada! -- humans to look at.

Laurel takes far more variation from kingdom to kingdom than any
slight variation that may be on our forms.


The largest visible source of variation will simply be due to
where the original is placed on the glass on different
photocopiers.  I've seen copies come to kingdom where there was
only a little shred of the header left, or lines going almost to
the edge.  I would imagine that different photocopies slightly
distort the copies too.

About the "little reduced": while I was designing the forms
(based on the final Drachenwald forms, from an original idea by
Cecil B. DeMille ... oy, what a bizarre thing it was), I printed
a copy on the local printer, and then immediately afterwards a
copy on the better printer in the lab.  Not a different version
of MS Word -- not even a different session -- not a different
file -- no commands in between -- just File-Print-OK then
immediate File-Print-Preferences-OK.  They came out different,
one radically different from the other and what was on my screen,
because that printer had very slightly larger margins than the
other, but I was pushing the margins, so bad line breaks happened
all over.  I fixed that particular instance by shortening some
lines.

So much for "WYSIWYG", "What You See Is What You Get".  More like
"What You See Vaguely Resembles What You Get If You Get Lucky".

Given that experience, I am quite willing to believe that any
particular configuration of MS Word version + installed fonts +
printer drivers + MS Windows version + printer will print
slightly differently than any printout made anywhere else in the
known Universe -- that, in fact, short of an exact disk-to-disk
copy and use of the same printer, or advanced nanotechnology
circa 2065 AD, that it is probably impossible to get an exact
copy.

However, if you happen to have copies of the originals that
Gwenllian sent out, and can compare them with the "slightly
reduced" copies, I would be curious to know how much they differ
and where.

Daniel de Lincolia
-- 
Tim McDaniel is tmcd at jump.net; if that fail,
    tmcd at us.ibm.com is my work account.
"To join the Clueless Club, send a followup to this message quoting everything
up to and including this sig!" -- Jukka.Korpela at hut.fi (Jukka Korpela)
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