Bush Service Memos Questioned

Twirlip of the Mists writes "Last night, CBS News released a set of memos dated 1972 and 1973 that are purported to raise questions about President Bush's National Guard service. Some are saying those memos might have been produced with a computer. Blogger Scott Johnson ran with the story first this morning, raising questions about the typography of the memos. Blogger Charles Johnson (no relation) went one step further, actually reproducing one of the memos in its entirety using Microsoft Word's default settings. Matt Drudge is running the story now with a link to a CNS News article that includes quotes from typography experts at font foundries Afga Monotype and Bitstream. There's a round-up of key facts about the story on this blogger's web site." The experts in the CNS News story and others could come to no conclusion, and even if the documents are not originals or photocopies of originals, that doesn't necessarily mean that they aren't faithfully retyped copies of originals. CBS continues to assert the documents are authentic.

Comments

Re:The actual documents seem to be slashdotted

[Twirlip of the Mists]

That would be the cretin you want to get elected to the Whitehouse.

It's two words: White House.

Several people are claiming that they used Selectric golfballs with proportional pitch.

Impossible. The pitch on a Selectric isn't controlled by the type ball. It's controlled by the motor drive. The type ball just rotates and elevates to strike a letter on the paper. There's nothing about it that controls how far the type head advances on each letter strike.

but I certainly don't see how you claim to know the exact capabilities of every typewriter owned by the US military.

I've had sixteen hours now to work on this story. ;-) How many people from IBM have you talked to today?

IBM sold selectric golfballs with the th superscript at the time.

Yes. They were custom items that were machined to order and that cost a fortune. And they also could not produce variable-pitch type, nor could they produce Times New Roman type.

There is no reason why they could not have offered their IBM Executive series machines with a similar option.

Yes, there is: the Executive machines didn't use interchangeable type balls. They used a lever-arm mechanism. Either all Executive typewriters would have had the "th" glyph or none of them would have. None did. IBM never made one with that glyph.

And no, the typeface is not MICROSOFT anything, Microsoft has never designed a typeface ever. The Microsoft fonts are from Monospace corp.

LOL. You mean "Monotype?" Heh. When TrueType came along in the early 1990s (or was it late 1980s?) Microsoft licensed the name and the letter forms from Monotype, now Agfa Monotype. Microsoft implemented the font, which means they determined the letterspacing, kerning pairs and so on.

The CTO of Agfa Monotype, incidentally, is on the record saying that it was highly unusual for anyone to use proportional-pitch type in the 1970's. The technology just wasn't there.

The 'expert' you refer to is not regarded as such outside the US republican party.

Sorry, but that's simply not true. He's so influential in the industry of forensic document analysis that other researchers write papers about him.

There is only one google hit for Bouffard and typewriter that relates to a forensic case and that is a crank case involving UFOs.

Your Google-fu is lacking.