Photocopiers do not care about your margin notes. When a custodian brings us a phrase sheet that has been copied three times since 2016, we often find words that drifted half a line — “canyon” becomes “candy” because the descender on the y clipped on the glass plate.
Steel plates do not suffer this problem. The reconciliation session therefore starts with a format audit: which copy is authoritative, and which copies are reference only? Clients who label generations (“original notebook,” “2019 copy for attorney,” “2022 re-copy after flood”) save us forty minutes of orientation.
We recommend keeping one pen type per generation. Blue ballpoint in the master notebook, black gel in the attorney copy. When a mismatch appears, the ink colour tells us which transcription pass introduced the error.
If you must photocopy, use a flatbed scanner at 600 dpi and print on archival paper. Feed-through copiers skew lines when pages curl. These are mundane details, but they determine whether your heir reads word twelve correctly in twenty years.