The back of a Tektronix Circuit Computer’s bottom deck carries instructions and information:
A separate instruction manual told you how to use the thing, under the reasonable assumption you’d be intimately familiar with slide rules.
In this day and age, the back should carry how-to-use instructions, so I summarized the manual into half a dozen lists:
Which looked fine & dandy & ready to print, thereby exposing various typos / inconsistencies / misalignments:
Whereupon I (re)discovered just how much paper matters.
The HP Brochure Glossy inkjet paper on the left produces wonderful results with a 0.5 mm Pilot V5RT ball point pen and has coating on both sides. It’s intended for handouts, brochures, and suchlike; the Pilot pens produce identical results on either side.
The same text, printed on plain old 22 pound “multipurpose” paper on the right, looks much better and makes the HP paper looks like something done with crayon on paper towel.
I could try a font with finer strokes, but … ick.
It’s unclear whether Brochure Matte paper would make any difference, nor whether running coated “inkjet” paper through a laser printer would have an … infelicitous … outcome.
Past experience shows the unsteady ziggurat of Linux printing doesn’t respond well to tweakage: when the default settings don’t work, there’s no easy / predictable way to change any particular setting.
For future reference, print the instruction on what will become the back of the bottom deck, mark the center point, tape it to the CNC 3018 platform, touch off XY = 0 at the center, and draw the front scales: everything lines up perfectly without extra fuss & bother.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 