Digital BW, The Print

I've read the help file and Tom Moore's tutorial about curve creation
following my previous post, but still can't understand exactly how to
judge the patches for maximum density - there are some conflicting
directions.

When looking for the patch that represents the % ink at which the
paper is loaded, should I use a loupe, as Tom says, or unaided
eyeballing as Roy's help file says AND should I start from the light
end of the scale and find the lightest tone that seems
undifferentiated from the rest of the black patches or should I start
from the black end and find the darkest tone that can be distinguished
from the next darkest tone? The wording in help and tutorial is
confusing because I get much different values depending on which way I
work it, as explained in my previous post on this topic (like 50% one
way and 85% the other).

Despite the confusion, I've run the program both ways and neither one
gives good results, so I really don't know what I'm missing. 

Also, in Tom's tutorial he talks about some kind of text file for
making a curve adjustment, but I can't find it under Curve Creation in
version 2.2.0 that I'm using. Has that been eliminated and replaced by
some other method built into the pull down menus and tabs?

I'm trying to make QTR work for an 1160 with MIS original pigment
quadtone inks on a WinXP system.

Frank