TANG Typewriter Follies; Wingnuts Wrong

[Bdog]

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/9/10/34914/1603

Against my own better judgment, but because I believe that the more rapidly charges are countered, the better, I spend a goodly portion of the last day researching -- shudder -- typewriters of the '60s and '70s. As everyone on the planet no doubt knows by now, the hard-right of the freeper contingent -- specifically, LittleGreenFootballs, a site which frequently is cited for eliminationist rhetoric and veiled racism, and PowerLine, a site linked to with admiration by such luminaries as Michelle Malkin and Hugh Hewitt -- discovered that if you used the same typeface, you could make documents that looked almost -- but not exactly -- like the TANG documents discovered by CBS News. This qualifies as big news, of course, so from those two sites, the story has spread into the mainstream media through the usual channels, most notably Drudge, NRO, etc.

Snip...

We're going to make this simple.

First, of course, in order to do this, he first had to reduce the document so that the margins were the same, since the original PDF distributed by CBS is quite a bit larger. Then he superimposed the two documents, such that the margins on all sides lined up.

What he then discovered is that Times New Roman typeface is, when viewed on a computer monitor, really, really similar to Times New Roman typeface. Or rather, really really similar to a typeface that is similar to Times New Roman typeface.

Um, OK then.

You see, a "typeface" doesn't just consist of the shape of the letters. It also is a set of rules about the size of the letters in different point sizes, the width of those letters, and the spacing between them. These are all designed in as part of the font, by the designer. Since Microsoft Word was designed to include popular and very-long-used typefaces, it is hardly a surprise that those typefaces, in Microsoft Word, would look similar to, er, themselves, on a typewriter or other publishing device. That's the point of typefaces; to have a uniform look across all publishing devices. To look the same. You could use the same typeface in, for example, OpenOffice, and if it's the same font, surprise-surprise, it will look the same.

So kudos on discovering fonts, freeper guy.

Next, however: do they really match up? Well, no. They don't.

If you shrink each document to be approximately 400-500 pixels across, they do indeed look strikingly similar. But that is because you are compressing the information they contain to 400-500 pixels across. At that size, subtle differences in typeface or letter placement simply cannot be detected; the "pixels" are too big. If you compare the two documents at a larger size, the differences between them are much more striking.

For instance: In the original CBS document, some letters "float" above or below the baseline. For example, in the original document, lowercase 'e' is very frequently -- but not always -- above the baseline. Look at the word "interference", or even "me". Typewriters do this; computers don't. Granted, if you are comparing a lowercase 'e' that is only 10 or 12 pixels high with another lowercase 'e' that is only 10 or 12 pixels high, you're not going to see such subtleties. That doesn't prove the differences aren't there; it just proves you're an idiot, for making them each 12 pixels high and then saying "see, they almost match!"

[KurtNYC]

1. The road ahead

I'm guessing that when they finally concede that there were/are typewriters at TANG which produced thousands of memos like these they will no doubt shift to saying that these are forgeries BECAUSE such typewriters still exist. And our access to and interest in, such typewriters will prove their theory to their own satisfaction.

Real forensics would look for other memos produced on Killian's typewriter at on dates near those of the CYA memos. All typewriters have little idiosyncracies; chipped letters, mis-aligned keys. You would try to match to that kind of "fingerprint."

[Dems Will Win]

2. Plus WORD software was programmed to IMITATE THE FONTS

AVAILABLE ON ELECTRIC TYPEWRITERS IN THE FIRST PLACE!

A programmer came on DU and explained how MS programmers tried to imitate the electric typewriter fonts of the time as CLOSELY AS POSSIBLE. Yet there was still tiny differences.

[Qutzupalotl]

3. My attempt to make them match up

It's definitely not a word document. It's a typewriter font from the time period.

Also worth noting that a typewritten superscript appears in other Bush documents from 1968.