What's your type?

There was more than a flurry of activity today in the worldwide Yahoo group devoted to typewriter collecting. A story on BBC News about current sales of typewriters led with a visual of words on a page between a ribbon and the platen: To be continued...

The debate was simple — the words didn't look like they were typewritten at all. They had the smooth look of laser printing. Someone suggested it had been typed and then photo shopped to look this way.

Regardless, this typewriter collector was thrilled to hear there is still a factor in India somewhere turning them out. And that thousands still buy new typewriters in Japan, where the challenges of two syllabalaries and thousands of ideograms makes a traditional western typewriter useless. And just how does one spell syllabalary?