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A comment on How Did Dennis Ritchie Produce His PhD Thesis? [pdf].

Re:How Did Dennis Ritchie Produce His PhD Thesis? [pdf] by sedatk on Wednesday March 15, 2023 @10:28PM (#35177439)
"The braces are not perfect— clearly they have been done by hand—but they are very precise"

There were plastic template stencils/rulers that let you draw great looking braces.

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Re:How Did Dennis Ritchie Produce His PhD Thesis? [pdf] by segfaultbuserr on Wednesday March 15, 2023 @11:17PM (#35177727)
Possible. These kinds of templates were the standard tool for drawing engineering schematic symbols (like transistors or logic gates) before CAD.
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Re:How Did Dennis Ritchie Produce His PhD Thesis? [pdf] by mrweasel on Thursday March 16, 2023 @02:39AM (#35178888)
The whole thing is probably done by hand and Ritchie just had excellent handwriting.
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Re:How Did Dennis Ritchie Produce His PhD Thesis? [pdf] by jhncls on Thursday March 16, 2023 @03:23AM (#35179158)
It would be hard to beat Edger Dijkstra's handwriting. See e.g. the one numbered 831, where he explains the naturalness of zero-indexing [0].

[0]: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF

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Re:How Did Dennis Ritchie Produce His PhD Thesis? [pdf] by workmandan on Thursday March 16, 2023 @06:25AM (#35180145)
What a joy to parse!
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Re:How Did Dennis Ritchie Produce His PhD Thesis? [pdf] by jgilias on Thursday March 16, 2023 @09:57AM (#35182022)
It’s…

I have horrible handwriting that I’ve never been ashamed of. Now I am.

Thanks for posting this!

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Re:How Did Dennis Ritchie Produce His PhD Thesis? [pdf] by carabiner on Thursday March 16, 2023 @04:09AM (#35179410)
Draftsmen used to practice freehand lettering. The end result, without stencils, looked indistinguishable from print.
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