Some posters over at the FreeRepublic website first noticed something they thought was fishy with the memos. Then this morning the guys over at PowerLineBlog grabbed the ball and started running with the story. This was followed by Charles at LGF cranking out a Word document that looked suspiciously like one of the memos in question. Pacetown followed with a post of his own. This brought about a rebuttal from The Talent Show entitled Grasping at Straws. So who's right?
Well, I've got Office. I've got Photoshop. Ain't no evidence like the type you investigate yourself. So, I grabbed the original pdf file from here. I then fired up Word X for the Mac and typed this (TNR font, 12 pts. No mucking with the margins or anything). From these two files I produced two screenshots (click on image to download large tiff files)
Original PDF:
My Document:
Dumped them into Photoshop, killed the background on my version, coloured it Red and overlaid it on the original, which was coloured blue. Five minutes of rotating and stretching and this is what we get:
(Click on image for large png of the file).
If you're curious you can also look at the psd file I created to do this. And all of this was done with a 10 lb baby in my left arm.
The result? Well, The Talent Show's Photoshop skills leave something to be desired. Its wasn't all that hard to get a better fit between the original and a freshly typed Word document. As for the match, well it ain't perfect, but its not convincingly all that different either. Line spacing is essentially the same, as are the word breaks. There's some divergence around the text in the first line of each bulleted paragraph, but how much faxing and/or copying could cause the difference I have no idea. This little exercise certainly doesn't prove to me conclusively that the document is a fake, but iI find it pretty compelling. What are the odds that a document produced over 30 years ago on a typewriter would match that closely to something banged out on Word in less than five minutes? I'll leave that as an exercise for you readers.
10 comments:
Well done, Nathan, thanks for the hard work!
have you tried printing it out, then scanning it back in? there are slight differences between printer and screen fonts. it would probably account for the differences in spacing (it did at powerline for the superscript alignment, for example)
cyfir -at- cox . net
And have you tried this with a similar document known to be authentic? Maybe all you're proving is that the Times New Roman computer font is accurate to the physical font, which would not be so shocking.
Three words:
IBM Selectric Composer.
Proportional typewriter in 1972. Multiple fonts (including Times -- IBM called it "Press Roman". Curly quotes. Different point sizes (from 7 through 14).
Text samples, plus instructions on how to mix multiple point sizes (for the "th") on page 88 of the following manual:
http://ibmcomposer.org/docs/Selectric%20Composer%20Operations%20Manual.pdf
How people forget. Times New Roman is Microsoft's clone of Adobe's version of Times Roman, a font that dates well before 1900. Just because Microsoft cloned the font metrics of an old font doesn't lend ANY weight to the idea that overlaying it with a Word document means that it must BE the Word document Many proportional typewriters did the same metrics just fine. Indeed, the differences are more telling. Notably, Times New Roman's numbers are slightly different from the ones in the memos (notably the 4 and 0). I doubt this is a Word thing.
Anon says:
How people forget. Times New Roman is Microsoft's clone of Adobe's version of Times Roman, a font that dates well before 1900. Just because Microsoft cloned the font metrics of an old font doesn't lend ANY weight to the idea that overlaying it with a Word document means that it must BE the Word document Many proportional typewriters did the same metrics just fine. Indeed, the differences are more telling. Notably, Times New Roman's numbers are slightly different from the ones in the memos (notably the 4 and 0). I doubt this is a Word thing.Too bad the text in the pdf of the manual is so bad since it will make the comparison of their text example with one created in word damn near meaningless (anyone know where I can get a better PDF of this document?) I'll still give it a wack when I get home, though.
A question though: did the typewriter have its tabs set to perfectly line up with the default tabs in Word? How about the line spacing? These are things I'd like to know. If anyone can provide some sample text from one of these beasts I'll gladly do another comparison.
Anon says:
And have you tried this with a similar document known to be authentic? Maybe all you're proving is that the Times New Roman computer font is accurate to the physical font, which would not be so shocking.Actually, its shown a little more than that. Its also shown that
a) the fonts are the same
b) the font spacings are the same
c) the line heights are the same
d) the margins are very, very similar (if not the same)
e) the tabs are the same
Is it still definitive proof? Nope. But, that's an awful high hurdle to prove coincidence.
Looks like one of the Typewriter wonks over at Selectric.org has already done a comparison of MS Word fonts with similar IBM typewriter fonts. It still doesn't make the case for authenticity.
IBM's font and Microsoft's font are not going to be the same. The documents' font is pretty surely Times New Roman, Microsoft's own TrueType font, which it owns. There are many Times fonts, and they're similar. But not the same. If they were the same, you would read about Microsoft being sued for stealing the typeface.
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