To tell the machine that you want to justify, first pull down the Justification Lever on the right side of the Justification Dial. This puts it into a "justifying mode," causing the Justification Tube to function as you type to measure your line of copy. For example, look at the following pictures:

The Justification Lever slides down from the "2" position down to the "9" (on the outer dial). In this picture, the Composer is in the "Justify" mode -- the lever is in the pulled-down location around the "9".

Next, you would type the first line of the text to be justified. Since the machine is now in the "Justify" mode, the Composer will measure the length of the line and count spaces while you type. The justification tube has a small window with a color guide and ruler. As you type, the color bands change in length. When you approach the right margin and have finished typing the last characters on the line, you will note the left-most color and the number that its' right-most edge is touching.

In this example, the upper measurement is "blue-5", the next one is "orange-8" and the last one is "green-4".

At this point, the type element (the ball) is positioned at the end of the line. You can now tab past the margin and type a small code next to the line to indicate its measurements. An example follows:

In the above example, the Justification Tube's measurements were "orange-1", "blue-2", "orange-2" and "green-1".

Now that the copy has been measured, it must be retyped, however this time, before typing each line, the Justification Dial will be set to the measurements as noted when the text was typed the first time.

First, the Justification Dial is released. In the following picture, you can see that it is back around the "8" position on the outer dial.

Next, the inner dial (raised area with a white line) is set to the color, and the outer dial is positioned so that the desired number is at the top of the dial. In the following picture, the dial has been set to "Orange-5" because the inner wheel points to the "Orange" color and the outer wheel points to the number "5".

If you were to justify the text shown in the above example, you would first set the dial to "Orange-1", then type the first line. Then you would set the dial to "Blue-2", and then type the second line. As each line is typed, the Composer automatically inserts the correct amount of space between each word that will cause the text to be justified.

The Composer does not have a correction feature, so if you make a mistake typing a line, you must space down and type it again.