How can this be so? Because proportional
printing was apparently quite
popular and desirous up until about the late 70's when the early PC's began
appearing, but they did not do proportionally printing nearly as
easily or as well as the much more expensive dedicated word processors
they were replacing. Although OEM
Selectics and daisywheel
printers could proportionally print and had been around for a
while, PC software never really supported them fully. Even WordStar,
the first PC word processing software that offered features similar to
a dedicated word processor, needed some unsimple
help to do it right.
It wasn't until the first Mac's
and Windows-based
PC's, along with the introduction of relatively inexpensive laser
printers (at the time) and high quality dot
matrix printers that proportional printing came back in vogue
beginning roughly in the late 80's.
Some more proportionally printed document samples in PDF format: Oct. 2, 1970;
March 27,
1972; April
27,1972; May 18, 1972; and April 26,
1974.
