Posted on 12/09/2004 10:09:32 AM PST by weegee
Well, it was worth the wait, notwithstanding the damage they did in the meanwhile. Rather's legacy will always be Memogate. Like Clinton, he ain't going to change that legacy thingy either...
Another Clinton legacy, the late Friday document/news dump. I think seeBS learned quite a bit from good ol' Slick.
Again. Heh heh heh. Couldn't happen to a nicer network.
Indeed, Mr. Hailey gives great importance to certain details of the letter shapes as they appear in the CBS reports, while ignoring that the shapes that appear there are almost certainly not the shapes that were present on the originally-faxed document.
In particular, the device that faxed the documents used a pixelization algorithm which preserves relative line thickness at the expense of relative line placement. Small details are always rendered as being a minimum of two pixels high in the vertical direction; the shape of that two-pixel-high image will be affected by the top and bottom side of the detail being faxed.
He notes that Times New Roman has a slanted top on the '1', whereas the samples don't. What he fails to note is that the underside of the top of the '1' is horizontal. Many other letters which appear with deformed serifs have curves on the 'insides' of the serifs even though the outsides are straight. This would again be consistent with the type of faxing artifacts I described.
Proportional spacing is not impossible with a typewriter; someone with a very steady hand could achieve whatever spacing was desired by using one hand to hold the carriage in proper position (with the thumb on the release) while the other hand types. Indeed, many typists have done this on occasion when replacing e.g. a seven-letter word with a ten-letter word (a half-space shift will get one extra letter in neatly, but typing two characters on adjacent half-spaces is ugly); using fudgy spacing is still a big ugly, but not quite so bad.
Of course, the likelihood of a typist doing an entire document that way, with spacing that just so happens to match Times New Roman...
Out of curiosity, did the versions of Times New Roman used by printing houses in 1972 have the modern "f" shape? Look at some old books and you'll notice that the lowercase "f" changed with the advent of phototypesetting.
PING
Animated gif showing overlay of the forgery with text from MS-Word:
Thanks for the ping. I saw this on LGF earlier today. Newcomer makes this Ute a laughingstock. Hard to believe CBS would be so dense as to rely on the Ute, but we'll see.
But as I said what I found interesting about Mr. Healey's piece is that he focuses on many technical minutiae which, even if prevent in the original documents, would have been obscured by a generation or two of faxing. I also find interesting the way he tries to make comparisons with Times-Bold, which is assuredly not the font used. While I don't particularly fault those who earlier guessed Bookman or New Century Schoolbook (the latter would have been my first guess), an analysis of the serifs and what faxing did to them makes clear the character shapes are all consistent with Times New Roman whereas some are inconsistent with most other fonts.
I want CBS to present the original signed document (typewritten and ink signature on the same sheet).
In the absence, they got s!!t.
Are you talking about "kerning" the f into the fi and ffi?
bttt
Actually, I'm talking about the shape of the character in cases where it isn't kerned. Looking through some moderately-old books (before 1970) it appears that the letter "f" only has its "modern" shape when it's part of a ligature. Otherwise the top is much narrower than is common in modern typefaces, probably because of the difficulty in producing overhangs.
Note, btw, that technologies certainly existed in 1972 which could produce overhangs. Someone using a pantograph engraver, for example, would have had no trouble (see an 1878 page of sheet music for an example). Even lead type could reproduce overhanging characters, although the type necessary for doing so was very delicate and would have been incompatible with automated typesetting equipment; it's doubtful anyone in 1972 would use such type for anything except the most demanding documents.
In a way, btw, I find it interesting that while there was no technological hurdle to the IBM Executive producing a lowercase "f" that would overhang the following character (it would probably be possible to modify one to do so by adjusting whatever gizmo controls spacing), it doesn't do so. I'd think the output would look better if it did. I also find it surprising that IBM didn't produce a golfball-compatible version of the Executive (i.e. a typewriter that used interchangeable balls but allowed the crude proportional spacing of the typebar-based Executive). Mechanically it wouldn't seem all that hard.
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