A printed note with a nexus market address

A printed note with a nexus market address carries the string in ink. Between the page and the address bar sit a pair of eyes and a keyboard, sometimes with a phone camera in the middle.

What it is

A printed note with a nexus market address is a piece of paper carrying the string in ink. The path from the page to the address bar runs through the eyes and the fingers, sometimes with a phone camera in the middle if the reader used optical character recognition to read the run off the page. Paper is the oldest carrier in this rubric and the one that ages the most visibly.

A printed note has one strength no digital carrier has, which is that nothing running on any device can rewrite it after the ink has dried. The strength is also its weakness. The note does not update when the mirror rotates and it does not fade when the string stops answering. The reader has to treat the note as a snapshot, not as a subscription.

How the string was set on the page

Typeset

Printed with a font chosen by whoever made the page. The reader has no control over the choice, and the font decides how easy it is to tell a lowercase l from an uppercase I on the paper.

Handwritten

Written out by hand, with the shape of every character depending on the writer. Handwriting is where an o and a zero can look identical, and where a 5 can read as an s to a tired reader.

Machine printed at home

A home inkjet can smear a base32 run into a shape that the eyes fill in wrong. A worn cartridge is a common source of soft characters that read as more than one letter.

Received from elsewhere

A page printed at one place and handed to the reader at another has already been through a hand the reader did not watch. What ended up on the page might not be what was intended.

What breaks between the page and the address bar

• A lowercase l on paper that reads as an uppercase I to the eyes. Every path in the rubric has this trap, but paper is where it is hardest to disambiguate.
• An rn on paper that reads as an m. Both take about the same room on a line, and neither the eyes nor an ocr engine pick the difference up on a smeared print.
• A digit two mistaken for a letter z, or a five for a letter s. Base32 uses two through seven so digits are on the page, and some fonts blur the line.
• A wrap between two lines that a reader stitches back together without noticing they took a leading space along with the second line.

Lifeline

What paper preserves

Paper preserves the string as it was on the day it was printed and nothing else. It does not preserve the source. It does not preserve the note the reader had in mind about which of the three mirrors this one was. It does not preserve the reason the reader chose this string over the others. All of that has to sit alongside the paper, in a separate note or in the reader's memory.

Paper also preserves a mistake at printing time better than any digital carrier does. A digital note can be edited when the mistake is spotted. A printed note has to be thrown out and reprinted, which most readers never bother to do. A single wrong character printed once can stay in the same drawer for years, waiting for someone to type it in.

What to check before typing off the page

• The lighting on the page is good enough to tell the letter shapes apart. Bad lighting hides more base32 traps than any other single thing.
• The run has been retyped once into a plain text buffer on the same device that will paste it into the browser. Two rounds of eyes on the same run catch more than one.
• The paper is the reader's own copy, not a printed handout received from someone else. A handout is one more hand the reader did not see the string pass through.
• The reader knows what the vanity prefix on this site reads as, so an unfamiliar prefix on the page can be caught before the run is typed out.

Engagement

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