Pagination

From William Zinsser’s Writing with a Word Processor (1983). I had forgotten about the joys of pagination with an IBM Displaywriter:

But you don’t have to reinstruct the machine every time you paginate. You can program it to paginate on an inexact line count every time. Then you just press ENTER and sit back and listen to the machine cleaning up your mess. First you’ll see the words PAGINATING DOCUMENT at the top of the screen. This is the machine telling you what it has started to do. Then you’ll hear a series of irregular clunking noises from the diskette unit. This is the machine working its way through your document, bringing lines forward or back, incorporating the fragmentary pages and closing up the gaps.

The noise may continue for five or ten minutes, depending on how long the document is. It’s a metallic noise, not exactly pleasant, and yet it has a certain music, for it is the sound of the machine laboring to put your house in order. Sometimes there is a pause: the machine wonders how to negotiate a tricky crossing. Sometimes the clunks come in triumphant bunches: the machine has made it to the other side, brilliantly leaping across the ice floes.

Finally the clunks stop altogether and a message on the screen tells you that your document has been paginated. You are now ready to print it — almost. But first you should read it one more time, “scrolling” the pages from beginning to end, to see if the pagination has left any bad breaks. It probably has. You might find, for instance, that the last line on a page says CHAPTER III. The machine doesn’t know that this is a lousy place for CHAPTER III to be; it was only asked to paginate, not to make aesthetic judgments. You therefore move CHAPTER III to the next page yourself, perhaps lowering it somewhat because you like your new chapter headings to have some air.

This, of course, ruins the rest of the pagination. So you paginate it again, from that point on. The menu will ask you where you want to begin paginating. Tell it the page number, press ENTER, and listen to the clunking again. In fact, you may have to repeat the process several times.

Been there, done that. And now I remember why it was such a joy to use an Apple //c.

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