Microsoft's Default Font Is at the Center Of a Government Corruption Case (thenextweb.com)

Calibri, a font that was created in 2004 and made default option on PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, and WordPad by Microsoft in 2007, is currently sitting at the center of a corruption investigation involving Pakistan's Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif. From a report: Accused of illegally profiting from his position since the 1990s, Sharif is now under investigation by the Joint Investigative Team -- a collective of Pakistani police, military, and financial regulators -- after a treasure trove of evidence surfaced with 2016's release of The Panama Papers. In a report obtained by Al Jazeera, investigators recommended a case be filed in the National Accountability Court after concluding there were "significant gap[s]" in Sharif's ability to account for his familial assets. [...] Sharif contends that neither he, nor his family, profited from his position of power, a denial that came under scrutiny today after his daughter and political heir apparent, Maryam Nawaz, produced documents from 2006 that prove her father's innocence. Unfortunately for the Nawaz family, type experts today confirmed the documents were written in Calibri, a font that wasn't available until 2007.

Comments

And his poor brother San Sharif...

[dyfet]

I could not resist...

Re:And his poor brother San Sharif...

[unixisc]

And his humorous cousin Comic Sans Sharif

Same issue as the Dan Rather/George W. Bush papers

[Anonymous Coward]

I recall this same issue came up with the papers Dan Rather came up with about George W. Bush's military service. Just a note to all you forgers out there - use vintage equipment if you're producing documents after the fact! I presume we'll soon see a similar case where the tiny dots that printers produce will call out a printed document produced on a machine that did not exist at the time of printing.

Sharif don't like it

[scourfish]

Rock the bad font
Rock the bad font

Reminds me of Dan Rather & CBS!

[Anonymous Coward]

Dan Rather was adamant that they had genuine documents proving that George W. Bush shirked his duty in the Air National Guard and avoided being drafted to Vietnam.

Unfortunately for Rather, these documents were conclusively shown to have been written with Microsoft Word, and Word wasn't around during the Vietnam era...

Rather was shown to be a biased laughingstock with no credibility, and retired.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Reminds me of Dan Rather & CBS!

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Karl Rove is a genius; supplying fake documents of real facts to discredit the truth. Brilliant!!

Does it really prove it?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

I have an ASCII file that was created back when I was in grad school. I open it in my favorite text editor and issue a print command. The default font chosen by the text editor did not exist back when I was in grad school. Does it mean the text file did not exist then?

I don't know MsOffice font handling directives saved to the file. Does MsOffice explicitly names the default font in the save document? Or it just leaves it as "default font"? If a document is saved in the default font of 2006, and I open it today, does it display it in today's default font or will it use the default font of 2006?

Please don't dismiss it some stretched speculation made just for the sake of argument. MsOffice files are very very convoluted. For a long time, changing your default printer would change the margins on the document. Every grad student who chose to write the thesis in MsWord discovered it to their consternation. Pagination and margins change randomly. If someone else using that computer changed the printer or installed a new font, the thesis file saved on disk would print differently and it would fail mechanical check in the Registrar's office.