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.

• It types rather than draws: every character goes through the same strike as a key press, so it is bound by the same carriage — ink build-up, the bell at column 63, the margin stop at 71, 48 rows and no more — and you watch the keys light up and hear every blow.
• Lines wrap at the right margin, on word boundaries. A word longer than the line is broken where it lands.
• Indents are typed, not drawn. Leading blanks are reproduced with TAB presses and then spaces — a line of HEADER comes out as one tab and a space — and a tab in the file is one TAB press, because the machine's stops are five columns apart. Internal gaps are reproduced the same way, so a table in the file stays a table on the page.
• Characters the machine carries no slug for are struck as the nearest thing it has: brackets and braces become parentheses, an em dash becomes --, smart quotes become straight ones. Anything with no sensible stand-in is skipped rather than printed wrong.
• The keyboard is locked while it works and the pad drains from teal to grey. Pressing any key takes the machine back — that key stops the typist and types nothing. At the bottom of the page it stops on its own.

Typing on a phone

Touch typing on glass has no key edges to feel, so the pad models the aim instead:

• A key types only when the press lands near its centre. A press on a key border, in the gap between keys, or off-centre is a miss and types nothing.
• A miss pauses the keyboard for a second, and every further tap restarts the pause. Recovering from a miss means stopping, not hammering on.
• A crosshair marks the exact point you touched — teal on a hit, pink on a miss — so you can calibrate your aim, and the pad itself flushes pink and fades back over the length of the pause.
• The strip below the space bar is inert, so the swipe that switches apps on a phone costs you nothing.

Controls

Desktop — Shift = hold shift · Shift Lock = Shift+LeftCtrl · Enter = carriage return · Backspace = move left without erasing · Tab = next stop · RightCtrl = margin release · ↑ ↓ = roll the platen · scroll = zoom · drag = pan

Mobile — tap keys to type · hold Shift and tap for uppercase · ▲ ▼ = roll the platen · pinch = zoom · drag = pan

Roll bars — left, top = pull a page in · left, bottom = pull the page out · right, top = the typist · the knobs in between = roll the platen

Printing

The print view drops the whole machine — keyboard, rulers, knobs, nameplate, cursor — and lays out just the sheet: A4 portrait with 5 mm margins, 196 mm wide so the footer has room under it, framed with a hairline, credits below in faint ink.

One caveat if you print through a PostScript driver such as Adobe PDF: the driver may rebuild small text as a Type 3 outline font with no ToUnicode map, so the footer credits copy out as private-use gibberish and Acrobat draws an oversized text cursor over them. The page itself is fine — the browser's own Save as PDF embeds proper selectable text. To fix it in the driver, set Printing Preferences → Advanced → PostScript Options → TrueType Font Download Option to Native TrueType, and uncheck Rely on system fonts only in the Adobe PDF settings.

Development

The site is the directory clarknova.nosocial.net/: one hand-written index.html with inline CSS and JS, a service worker, a manifest and the audio samples. No framework, no bundler, no build step — open the file and it runs.

# static checks: HTML parse errors, duplicate ids, JS and CSS syntax,
# JSON, every href/src/audio/precache reference, every getElementById
npm install --no-save parse5@^7 acorn@^8 css-tree@^2
node tools/validate.mjs clarknova.nosocial.net

VERSION in clarknova.nosocial.net/sw.js is the single source of the release number: it is the cache-name suffix, the build workflow reads it, and the About dialog reads it back out. Bump it on every release, or clients keep the old bundle.

Credits

Built by NoSocial.Net and Ivan Khvostishkov — [email protected]. If the machine is useful to you, sponsor it — the Donate button in the About dialog points at the same place.

Type set in Special Elite, with Courier Prime and EB Garamond for the machine itself. Sounds are recordings of real typewriters.

The Clark Nova is a fictional machine from David Cronenberg's 1991 film Naked Lunch, adapted from the novel by William S. Burroughs. This project is an unaffiliated homage.