Clark Nova Typewriter

A typewriter that behaves like a typewriter. Ink is permanent, there is no undo, the keyboard is the machine's own and not your operating system's, and what comes out is an A4 sheet at 300 dpi that you can print or post.

clarknova.nosocial.net — a single HTML page, installable, works offline.

The story

The name comes from the Clark Nova, the insect-typewriter that talks back to Bill Lee in David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch. The machine underneath is a real one: a Royal Quiet De Luxe from 1956, in teal — which is where the colour of the keyboard comes from.

It is an homage to the time before we made documents on computers, when a letter was a physical object that went by post rather than an email that arrives while you are still deciding whether to send it. Writing on a machine that cannot backspace over a mistake is a different act from typing into a text box. You commit.

What is genuinely surprising is that no app anywhere — web, mobile or desktop — actually emulates the mechanics. There are plenty of typewriter fonts, and plenty of apps that play a clacking sound while you edit text you can still delete. What none of them reproduce is the physics: ink that builds up where you strike twice, overstriking instead of erasing, a carriage that stops at the right margin until you release it, a bell eight characters before that, a roller that moves in quarter lines, and a keyboard with the characters a 1956 machine actually had rather than the ones your OS thinks you want.

So the mechanics here are the point, and they are implemented rather than suggested.

From a toy to a tool

Because the sheet is a true A4 page at 300 dpi and prints as an image at that resolution, the output holds up as a real document rather than a screenshot of a joke. Applying "Insist on the Highest Standards" to something that started as a tribute is what turned it into something the author uses in earnest.

The clearest case is paper forms — the ones some organisations, banks especially, still send through the post. In the author's words:

If you don't bother to send me the PDF by email, why would I bother to fill the form in by hand, or scan it and type into a modern PDF editor? I will fill it in with Clark Nova, print it, and send it back to you on paper too — on the principle of proportional burden.

The workflow is the paper levers: scan the form at A4/300 dpi, pull it in as the sheet, roll the platen in quarter lines until the type lands in the boxes, type, print, post.

Features

Typewriter mechanics

• Ink is permanent. There is no erase, no undo, no delete. Backspace moves the carriage left without removing anything, which is how you overstrike — including umlauts, by striking a letter and then " over it.
• Ink build-up. Every strike grows the ink in that cell by a pixel, so striking the same character twice does not land identically twice: the letter gets heavier and rougher, the way a real slug loads the paper. Each glyph also prints with a slight bleed under it.
• The machine's own keyboard, not the OS layout: ½ ¼ ¢ @, " on shift-2, no separate number pad, no autocorrect, no dead keys.
• Carriage discipline. Home column 11. Bell at column 63. Right margin stop at 71, where the carriage refuses to go further until you press margin release. Hard stop at column 80, where further strikes print in place. Tab stops every five columns.
• Shift and shift lock as separate mechanisms, with the lock releasing when you press shift again.
• Quarter-line platen roll from the knobs on either side of the sheet, so the type can land between lines — which is what makes form-filling possible.
• Real typewriter samples for the strike, space, backspace, carriage return, bell, shift and roller — nine recordings, not synthesised clicks.

The page

• 2480 × 3508 px — A4 at 300 dpi, as a grid of exactly 80 columns × 48 rows (31 × 72 px cells).
• Type set in Special Elite at 56 px, the size a real machine strikes.
• Ink that is not black. Pure black exists in no ribbon and reads as artificial, so the type strikes in Pantone 19-4016 TPG "Inkwell", a desaturated blue-grey.
• Pan and zoom the sheet freely; the view follows the carriage as you type.

Getting paper in and out

The paper path is on the left roll bar, as two levers at its ends — the platen knobs still sit between them.

• Pull a page in (top lever) — feed a previously pulled sheet, a scanned form or a card back in and type on top of it. The image must be 2480 × 3508 px, ±1 px.
• Pull the page out (bottom lever) — save the sheet as a 2480 × 3508 PNG. A page that was fed in is offered back under the name it came in under, so a form goes back where it came from.
• Paper goes in and out as an image. To turn a PDF into one, or a typed sheet back into a PDF, use PDFhero.
• Reload for a fresh sheet.
• Print — A4 portrait, the sheet at 300 dpi inside a hairline frame, with a faint credit line below it. See Printing for the one driver quirk worth knowing.

The typist

The robot at the top of the right roll bar takes a .txt file and types it out on the machine — the point being a plain text file that comes off the platen as real typescript, ready to print.

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗