Dan Rather Lied: Company that owns font did not License it till 1980!

Charles Bigelow posted this article to the Usenet newsgroup "comp.fonts" in May 1994 in response to the question: What's the difference between Times Roman and Times New Roman? I am grateful to Prof. Bigelow for his permission to publish the article. I have taken the liberty of retitling it.

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Newsgroups: comp.fonts
Subject: Re: What's the difference between Times Roman and Times New Roman?
From: Charles Bigelow
Date: 5 May 1994

"Times Roman" is the name used by Linotype, and the name they registered as a trademark for the design in the U.S. "Times New Roman" was and still is the name used by The Monotype Corporation. The face was developed by The Times newspaper for its own use, under the design direction of Stanley Morison. Originally cut by the Monotype Corp. in England, the design was also licensed to Linotype, because The Times used Linotype equipment for much of its actual production. The story of "The Times New Roman" can be found in Stanley Morison's A Tally of Types, published by Cambridge University Press, with additional, though not quite the same, versions in Nicolas Barker's biography of Stanley Morison, and in James Moran's biography of SM. (There should be an apostrophe in that name, "Times' Roman", I suppose, though no-one uses it.)

During WWII, the American Linotype company, in a generous spirit of Allied camaraderie, applied for registration of the trademark name "Times Roman" as its own, not Monotype's or The Times', and received the registration in 1945.

In the 1980's, all this was revisited when some entrepreneurs, desirous of gaining the rights to use the name, applied to Rupert Murdoch, who owned The Times; separately, a legal action was also initiated to clarify the right of Monotype to use the name in the U.S., despite Linotype's registration.

The outcome of all of the legal maneuverings is that Linotype and its licensees like Adobe and Apple continue to use the name "Times Roman", while Monotype and its licensees like Microsoft use the name "Times New Roman".

During the decades of transatlantic "sharing" of the Times designs, and the transfer of the faces from metal to photo to digital, various differences developed between the versions marketed by Linotype and Monotype. Especially these became evident when Adobe released the PostScript version, for various reasons having to do with how Adobe produced the original PostScript implementations of Times. The width metrics were different, as well as various proportions and details.

In the late 1980's, Monotype redrew its Times New Roman to make it fit exactly the proportions and metrics of the Adobe-Linotype version of Times Roman. Monotype claimed that its new version was better than the Adobe-Linotype version, because of smoother curves, better detailing, and generally greater sensitivity to the original designs done for The Times and Monotype by Victor Lardent, who worked under the direction of Stanley Morison. During the same period, Adobe upgraded its version of Times, using digital masters from Linotype, which of course claimed that it had a superior version, so there was a kind of competition to see who had the most refined, sensitive, original, genuine, bona-fide, artistically and typographically correct version. Many, perhaps most, users didn't notice and didn't care about these subtle distinctions, many of which were invisible at 10 pt at 300 dpi (which is an em of 42 pixels, a stem of three pixels, a serif of 1 pixel, and so on).

When Microsoft produced its version of Times New Roman, licensed from Monotype, in TrueType format, and when Apple produced its version of Times Roman, licensed from Linotype, in TrueType format, the subtle competition took on a new aspect, because both Microsoft and Apple expended a great deal of time and effort to make the TrueType versions as good as, or better than, the PostScript version. During the same period, Adobe released ATM along with upgraded versions of its core set of fonts, for improved rasterization on screen. Also, firms like Imagen, now part of QMS, and Sun developed rival font scaling technologies, and labored to make sure that their renderings of Times, licensed from Linotype in both cases, were equal to those of their competitors. Hence, the perceived quality of the Times design became a litmus for the quality of several font formats. Never before, and probably never again, would the precise placement of pixels in the serifs or 's' curves etc. of Times Roman occupy the attention of so many engineers and computer scientists. It was perhaps the supreme era of the Digital Fontologist.

As for the actual visual differences in the designs, well, like any good academic author, I leave the detection and analysis of those "as an exercise for the reader".

Hey Retro, I got a nice little Freepmail from the newbie... did you get one? Just curious.

We went back and forth a bit, yes. Doesn't smell very genuine, does he?

The end of the exchange looked like this:

"...no one could fault us..." ??? The Dims fault us just for existing! Can you imagine the outcry if the documents turn out to be real. They won't listen to our explanations why we were wrong -- they'll just call us idiots.
_____________________________________
It's not about them. They always do the same thing.
Arguing as I have with Young Earth Creationists, the people who think the Earth is 6000 years old and created in 6 literal days, I've noticed an eerie similarity between said YECs and militant liberals.
They have specially received, insider knowledge. They are inflicting a better world on us whether we will have it or not. They are opposed by a cabal of evil dumb people. They are allowed to lie, cheat, and steal because the evil dumb people started it first and it's a Holy War, damn it!
They're the same people with left and right reversed. A little activism is a dangerous, very corrupting thing.
Don't worry about them. They're unreachable. Bullet-proof delusional system. Former YEC Glen R. Morton described the input-filtering they do as "Morton's Demon" by analogy with Maxwell's thermodynamic demon. Like the light bulb that has to want to change, they have to want to see what the Demon is filtering out. Most never will.
So it's not about them. It's about everybody else.

For some reason, haven't heard back after that.

Update on the "mysterious" kjnspc! Just found this in my mailbox:

"Doesn't smell very genuine, does he?" What is genuine? Is there some kind of litmus test to prove that one is genuine on FR? If you look again at my various posts, you'll see that I'm merely advising Freepers and allies to be absolutely certain. President Bush does not need uninformed supporters, with incomplete evidence, no matter how enthusiastic we are. If I were in a court a law, I wouldn't want any of the so-called experts on FR to be my lawyers. One small example: many Freepers claimed with absolute certainty that TimesNewRoman and Superscripting absolutely did not exist in 1972. Would that statement survive in court? Of course not.
My job, and my company, are involved in testing very complex factory automation systems. So complex, that it's not always obvious what the system is doing. Thus, it's in my nature to question everything until all of the facts are established.
But maybe I'm missing something ... maybe the FR approach is to always go on the attack, even with shaky evidence.

I replied as follows (some cleanup from FR's spell-check feature inserted):

You're phony through and through. If you're wandering around on these threads offering your words of "caution," you are presumably aware of the usual list of 40 or so areas where the seeming forger slipped up. Let me add another which I only saw today for the first time.
No typewriter or typesetting machine of the time had a "center" feature. (What was Killian doing typing memos on a $3000 typesetting machine anyway?) To do a "center," as was done for the letterhead in two memos typed months apart, you have to type out the strings to be centered in a block, physically measure their lengths, work out the starting point on the page for each line, and force the print point of the machine TO said start for each line typed.
So Killian apparently did this centering procedure in two memos months apart. (Killian, who apparently did not type but had a machine more expensive than a new car, a machine no one else in his office used!) When he did this, he got the exact same results three months apart.
The results are so much the same that when you overlay them digitally, they match up PIXEL BY PIXEL. Not closely, IOW, but exactly. This using a machine that didn't have pixels.
Here comes the Twilight Zone part. If you use a completely different technology, Microsoft Word, invented much later, which has this feature called "automatic justification" and you set that justification to "center" and type the same address, you get another thing that overlies Killian's two memos PIXEL BY PIXEL.
But, apparently, you have to use MS Word to do this. WordPerfect, an otherwise full-featured modern program with the same fonts and features, won't make a PIXEL BY PIXEL match. Spooky, huh? I've been playing with this one myself.
The difficulty seems to be that it MATTERS what technology you use to produce a thing. WordPerfect, while "full-featured," was independently developed and doesn't contain the exact same code doing the work. Slight but detectable differences in algorithm create detectable mismatches. That, and the fonts look a bit different although they're both 12 point Times New Roman.
Funny, huh? But some old typewriter did the same thing, including proportional spacing to the pixel level. A typewriter nobody can find, since it turns out you can't actually make a Selectric Composer do what Killian did. (There are some around and it's been repeatedly tried now.)
Then you have all those other 40 things. Maybe you can dismiss each one, separately. One or two of the dismissals may even be true. The P.O. Box may really have been 34567 and it seems to have been used elsewhere.
But all of the improbable dismissals being true at the same time for all of the 41 items has odds of something like 10 to the billion billionth power. It didn't happen that way.
The alternative explanation ties it all together rather neatly. If the documents are faked using MS Word, the spectacular pixel-level coincidences become inevitable rather than nearly impossible. The same explanation also accounts for every other item of the 41.
So there exists this reasoning tool called "Occam's Razor." You don't seem very familiar with it so you might need to Google it up. Anyway, you could say it says "When there are two or more explanations that can be made to work, prefer the simplest." The folk saying of "If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck!" uses the idea.
Applying Occam's Razor to you, we see that you signed up solely to express your concern that we are looking unreasonable for questioning Dan Rather's marvelous memos. In your judgment, WE have insufficient evidence, whereas Mr. Rather has evidently used sound and sober judgment in his journalistic professional responsibilities.
You're as fake as Danny's memos. By the way, you may have noted I've posted one of our exchanges so others can share the joke of your masquerade here. You may expect it with this one.

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