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:CBS must obtain and release originals

[autopr0n]

But the possibility exists that these forgeries were manufactured by CBS News. And that possibility is way too scary to dismiss out of hand.

No way would CBS news be that stupid, I mean really. If these are forgeries, they were done by someone who had access to the dead guys files. If someone at CBS had done it, they would have done a better job.

Times New Roman was designed in 1932.

[Futurepower(R)]

Someone was discussing this later in the story, and I looked it up. The Times New Roman typeface was designed by Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent in 1932.

Everything that produces proportional characters since then has, at a minimum, tried to imitate Times New Roman exactly. The old proportional spacing IBM Selectric typewriters and MS Word look identical because they are trying to be exactly identical.

Re:Try this

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Proportional letterspacing was not very rare

The "nuh-uh" argument? Typewriters that could do proportional letterspacing were very rare in 1972. The ones that were available were not equipped with Microsoft Times New Roman, a font that did not exist at that time.

Times Roman *did* exist at the time

Microsoft Times New Roman did not.

and that kind of kerning is *not* impossible

It is completely impossible for a mechanical typewriter. Why? Because kerning involves applying variable letterspacing (sometimes negative) depending on what letter you just typed. If you type a T, the o following it has to be offset to the left. No mechanical typewriter ever constructed has ever done that.

in my professional opinion as a typesetter, the kerning on the document exhibits attributes that one would expect from a proportional typewriter and not from Word.

Well, your professional opinion isn't worth much. Set the type in Word using the default settings. Compare and contrast. The letter spacing is identical. Not close, not similar. Identical, point for point.

And I've read that the IBM Executive was quite common in military office usage.

It was indeed. But it didn't produce output in the same font as that used in these memos, Microsoft Times New Roman, and it couldn't produce the miniature superscript "th" seen in these memos. So these memos were not typed on an IBM Executive.