Posted on 09/09/2004 3:47:33 PM PDT by GOPcapitalist
(scroll down to the bottom of the article for the update section):
UPDATE: NEW PROOF OF FORGERY
Following the Little Green Footballs blog lead, CB decided to test the pantograph replication technique on another of the CBS documents to see if it held true. Using Microsoft Word on its factory default settings with 12 point Times New Roman font we copied the address line of CBS memo #1 and overlapped the two for comparison.
As you can see the test worked and, in doing so, inadvertantly uncovered more proof that the document is a forgery. The new evidence revolves around the fact that Microsoft Word auto-formats its text using the centering function. When the text alignment for “center” is selected each subsequent line will be precisely centered underneath the previous one with each word of the text readjusting to meet this alignment as new letters are entered into the line. Since typewriters mechanically stamp letters onto a sheet of paper one at a time, it is physically impossible to create a mechanical typewriter document that perfectly aligns two or more centered rows of text on top of each other. The address bar on CBS Memo #1 is perfectly centered and perfectly aligned, thus it had to have come from a computer word processor and not a typewriter. The replication experiment in Microsoft Word with an identical match further validates this origin.
This seems like a good point to me.
Brit Hume said that one of his production assistants did the same test with the same results.
The Round Table is going to discuss that right after THIS break.
Poor Mara (evil grin).
Ping! Mechanical typewriters don't auto-center address lines at the page header.
60 Minutes should be canned and Dan Rather FIRED immediately. Then SwiftVets get 1 hour for every week until the election.
Nice Job!
In all fairness, back in the stone ages we used to center on mechanical typewriters all the time. It's just that the typist did the math rather than having the computer figure it out. :-)
It must really suck today to be a Democrat.
She's not there today.
I believe that if they ever can trace this thing back to its roots, we may well find that it all just adds more fuel to the fire regarding the theory that the Clinton's and their operatives are undermining Kerry so Hillary can be in position for 2008.
Ether way...this type of thing is putting forks into Kerry's campaign because he is done.
Just my two cents and opinion.
Interesting, though, that the example above does not feature the 'superscript' font that they've been questioning all day(?)
Another question is why the "th" in the top isn't superscripted but at the #2 point, it is.
Not physically impossible, just very, very, very, very, very, very, very improbable.
Good catch.
And in other news, DNC commissar Terry McAwful said:
"These fake documents were White House plants.
They hoodwinked the DNC and CBS, taking
advantage of our lust for power and general
gross incompetence on technical stuff.
It's all just so unfair."
I never thought of that, and obviously neither did someone else!
A very good typist could duplicate the centering trick. However, no one would wish to take the time to duplicate the "kerning" which is apparant in the document.
I ran the same test but missed the point that the text was perfectly centered. What are the chances that some guy with an IBM or Royal typewriter in 1972 would line the words up exactly the same way that Bill Gates would in 2004. Not a chance. Not one in a billion.
Per Britt: Killian's son said the documents are a mix of truth and fiction. Son said his father would not have stored these documents in his personal files. CBS said they stand by the authenticity of the documents, the schlubs.
CNN is, as of this very moment, preaching how these new documents are proof that Bush not only received preferential treatment, but also that he just didn't fulfill his duty.
FoxNews is at the same time questioning the validity of said "documents" using the exact MS Word argument.
Would you be willing to post a detailed uptake on the discussion on Brit's panel? Thanks. (Gave up our cable a few months back!)
I am willing to bet $50 bucks right now that Blather-boy is going to announce his retirement for "health reasons" or some similar excuse within the next 48 hours.
Any takers?
Yeah, it's one of those 1 in a billion something chances of a match.
Killian would have had to be sitting there for hours with a drafting ruler and perfect knowledge of the exact width of each and every letter to get them to line up perfectly centered!
Wrong.
There might have been an occasional case when the lines centered perfectly, but it was a function of the number of letters per line. With three lines, this is almost impossible to be mathematically perfect on a typewriter. I know. I used to do that. "Visually" centered, but not mathematically.
Mort trying to say this TANG business no longer matters and shouldn't be brought up, and Birnbaum basically stuck to the point that it does matter if the documents are forgeries.
Mort, Mort, Mort. It matters when it could kill the Republicans, but they want to change the subject when they get caught.
LOL!!! I was just wondering myself how long it would take before someone got around to mentioning that possibility. I didn't want to raise it myself because I don't want to be accused to giving the CRAPS any ideas.
No takers. Wasn't there something about him campaigning for Kerry part-time, or was someone funning us?
Excellent!
You just go to the center (you measured it), then backspace once for every two characters or spaces....
But it sure didn't look like the type on the letters in question.
I believe that this is going to be shown to prove to a lot more folks that CBS is on the Kerry payroll (so to speak). I'm hoping that there is a major backlash from this.
bump
Was the document created in MS Word?
Nobody knows.
But if it matches the word-wrap of MS Word exactly, odds are it was done on a machine that used the same paragraphing algorithm as MS does.
Which wouldn't be unusual - nearly all typesetting systems today, and the best typesetting systems for quite some time, have used a variant of Knuth's algorithm.
Which was first published in 1981.
Adobe has used Knuth's algorithm for 15 years, now. Microsoft for I don't know how long.
So it's not at all suprising that a word-processing or type-setting system would layout the text similarly to what MS Word would - if that word-processing or type-setting system had been developed after 1981.
It's close to an impossibility that a word-processing or type-setting system that predated 1981 would do so. Knuth's was the first to consider the layout of the entire paragraph when determining line-breaks. Which is what the typesetters had always done.
But no automated system prior to 1981 did so. Particularly no typewriter, no matter how sophisticated.
And no typist would manually lay out a paragraph while they were typing and break where Knuth's algorithm would break, except by random chance.
They're both right. The NG stuff doesn't matter. Media lies do matter.
Barnes on FNC said something about it being interesting that the doc without the superscript had a space between the number and the "th". Possibly so the word processing program wouldn't automatically create the supercript. Maybe that explains why the differences in the use of the supercript. Boy, it looks to me like someone wanted this to caught.
Democratic Party, CBS News and Dan Rather CAUGHT RED-HANDED perpetrating a fraud!!
This could have the effect of casting a "chill" over the rats' right to free speech.
Life is sweet when you win...
It is indeed possible to approximate your centering and get something there that is presentable, but since each letter is typed mechanically, it is virtually impossible to get it exactly centered like a word processor does. When you type a letter in a word processor it automatically readjusts every other letter to ensure equadistant variations around a center line. The word processer centers from the middle out in two directions whereas a typewriter centers in one direction from an approximation made going from a point slightly left of the center across the page.
If you had a typist who could do centering using proportional-spaced fonts, I'd like to meet her/him!
CBS News just took an H-bomb up the tailpipe.
Poor Dumbocrats!!!! With "His Lyingness" being in the hospital....they just can't get away with lying anymore.
Yes, but you centered by hitting the spacebar repeatedly. This would not permit you to perfectly center the text. For example, assume the text was 1.8" wide. To center it on an 8 1/2"-wide piece of paper with a 2" margin, you'd have to space in 2.25" minus 0.9" = 1.35". If there were 12 spaces to the inch, your two choices would be spacing in 16 spaces (1.33"), or 17 spaces (1.42"). Given three separate lines with three separate widths, this would result in the lines being imperfectly centered.
A laser printer, on the other hand, doesn't have to space in increments of 1/12th of an inch. It aligns the text with 1/300th of an inch precision. We'd have to take a ruler to the text in this example to be sure, but eyeballing it it looks a lot more like 1/300th" precision than 1/12th" precision. The poster has made a great catch here.
How could somebody be so stupid as to even attempt to pass something like this off?
Yes, that was certianly easy to do, IF YOU DON'T USE PURPORTIONAL TYPE!
To do the same with purportional type, you would have to compute the exact spacing for every letter, and space over the exact amount INCLUDING FRACTIONAL "SPACES". Old purportional typewriters could backspace less than one "real" space.
It may not have been possible at all to create this document with a typewriter, IF it proves that not even these sub-spaces will work exactly.
BUSTED!
This is hard-core proof!
It is hot too difficult to manually center lines using an old proportional typewriter. As a typist, you would know the pica or width value of each letter. A lower-case 'm' for instance, might be worth 5, while a lower-case 't' might be worth 2. As I recall, the widest of all letters on the old IBM Executives was 7 (upper case W). Then it's just a matter of totalling the value of each letter, adding an average of 3 picas between each word, dividing by 2, finding the center point, backspacing the required number of units, and then typing the line. The typist had the freedom to add or subtract units between words (or even units between letters in a word) so as to make an individual line or word come out "right." I have done this exercise hundreds, if not thousands, of times, in my old life as a "repro" typist in the 1970's.
On other thing, the 'backspace' key on these typewriters moved the platen back just 1 unit. I.e., to backspace over an 'm' would take 5 strokes, over a 't' would take 3 strokes.
All of this is just to say that I am becoming convinced the Killian document is a forgery. While it is definitely possible to manually center individual typewritten lines, it seems implausible to me that such lines typed 30+ years ago would somehow exactly duplicate the same exercise of today's word processors.
Sorry to be so long winded.
Sometimes I get weary reading some of the trivial tripe that passes for commentary on Free Republic and lament the days gone by when the Giants of Discourse roamed Freeperland. But, on days like this, I am reminded of the true value of Free Republic.
They cannot lie, they cannot hide, they cannot distort and deceive. Why? Because of Freepers like you who come forward and stand tall when the times demand and lay out the truth for all to see.
Thank you, sir. Thank you
Exactly. Remember going to the center and then backspacing to try and get everything centered? And, if you had an odd number of letters it was never perfect! Now I'm showing my age...LOL
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