Re: Red can't be Read

[William Beaty <billb@ESKIMO.COM>]

On Sat, 22 Jul 2000, Tom McCarthy wrote:

> Are any of you amateur detectives on the side?  I have a friend who has
> family letters from the 1800's with black ink across the page as you would
> expect and for some reason, faded red ink running through the black and
> pretty much at a right angle to it.

I recall hearing that John Adams frequently used this technique (it cuts
the amount of paper in half.)  The red ink sounds like a good trick for
increasing readability.  Maybe it would have been better to use green ink
and red ink, that way some colored filters could have been used to make
one color vanish.  Hey, with red/green ink, the writing could overlap on
the same lines, so four times the writing could be put on one page.

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