Gotta love our U.S. media and their vigorous pursuit of the news that results in “to the minute” B. Spears marital status updates, but takes 5 yrs to break something B. Barnes went on the public record with in ’99.

Judicial Watch had requested in August that the Navy open an investigation of the matter, but Route said in an internal memo obtained by The Associated Press that he saw no reason for a full-scale probe.

Here is a statement by Vice Adm. R.A. Route on Kerry’s Silver Star, “Route concluded that there was no justification for looking further into the decisions to award the medals or the anti-war activities.

“Conducting any additional review regarding events that took place over 30 years ago would not be productive,” he wrote. “The passage of time would make reconstruction of the facts and circumstances unreliable, and would not allow the information gathered to be considered in the context of the time in which the events took place.”

The group’s (Judicial Watch) president, Tom Fitton, called Route’s review a “whitewash” and said Judicial Watch would “appeal as appropriate.”

“The Navy IG obviously is afraid of the political ramifications of a thorough investigation into a presidential candidate’s service record,” Fitton said in a statement.
http://apnews1.iwon.com/article/20040918/D855P8FO0.html

But the Kerryites have no problem with digging up dirt on GWB when he was in the Air Guard thirty years ago. Even if they have to fake it. Good for the goose but not for the gander?

All of this debate about memos and medals is just a smoke screen to keep the focus off John Forbes Kerry’s flip-flopping and his lack of any plan for anything, his voting record in the Senate, and his poor attendance record there. Why don’t we just forget about what happened thirty years ago and concentrate on the future or our Great Republic.

Who, if not the DoD would be able to buy expensive typewriters? I bet the USA Government, especially the DoD, was a MAJOR buyer of IBM typewriters. It was WAR time, and money was spent!

Unless these people were doing his job for him (Killian), there are any number of things that a professional does on any given day that family and friends do not know about. It’s a JOB! Eight hours a day …. not everything is replayed for the family! And a PROFESSIONAL should really keep personnel matters in the office and not discussing them openly, anyhow.

Was it possible or not to create the documents in question using technology available at the time? Was that technology present on the NG base at the time? How about openning up OTHER guard files of Bush contemporaries and checking out the fonts. QED.

Everything else is fluff. I do not purport to be an expert on IBM technology. But, I know enough to have noticed that the majority of typewriters in government DoD offices where I worked were IBM. (They maybe were expensive, but then we are talking DoD.) AND generally, nearby the typewriter there were (often) several extra font balls for users to interchange. It was a pretty easy thing to do. Again, I was no secretary, but I knew enough about IBMs to type a few papers myself and even change the font ball, as well. It really was not too difficult.

Also, if the memo were faked in a word-processor, wouldn’t the ‘th’ in 111th be scaled from the normal ‘t’ and ‘h’ characters? Real ordinals (a,b,d,e,i,l,m,n,o,r,s,t superscripts) are only found in “expert” or Open Type fonts. So if the memos are from a word-processor, they should be noticibly lighter. Maybe if CBS posted higher resolution scans, it would be possible to tell.

If CBS decided to run with these based on the idea that it was “possible” they were created in 1972, without any other evidence of authenticity, they would be doing a seriously stupid thing, because they just don’t look like the product of any common typewriter.

However, CBS says they have corroborating evidence that makes them believe that the memos are true.

This new story about Killian’s secretary saying they aren’t real, but the content is correct, raises the possibility that they were produced by someone who saw the original memos at the time and decided to recreate them from memory. If so, that would explain why CBS would be able to get corroboration.

I still don’t think the font in those memos looks enough like Times New Roman. It might look like PostScript (Linotype) Times Roman, which would imply that they were created on a Mac or with a PostScript printer. I don’t have a Times Roman sample handy to check.

And ST, I also agree that you should type a sample on that typewriter, scan it, and put it on a web site or send it to someone who can do so. A digital photo of the keyboard or the typebar with the ‘th’ would be great as well. If you don’t have a scanner or digital camera, just post your general location and I’ll bet someone would be willing to come over with a digital camera. You can email me if you like and I’ll try to find someone trustworthy to take a digital picture. My email address on this post is my real address, and my name is my real name.

Purely as an interesting aside, Roman and Italic don’t refer to slanting, but to the lettering style they ultimately derive from. Roman lettering does tend to be straight up and down, and Italic tends to be slanted, but really Roman derives from stone-cut letters and Italic derives from calligraphic letters. There are Italic faces that don’t slant at all. Eric Gill liked to create Italics without slant – for example Perpetua Italic.

Practically speaking, of course, you’re right – 95% or more of italic faces slant. And I can’t think of a slanted roman off hand.

For the record, “roman” means straight up and down, as opposed to “italic” which is slanted.

What’s the likelihood that the Texas Air National Guard had state-of-the-art typewriters with sophisticated features that were only used to type these four memos? The other memos from this period seem to be typed on regular old typewriters.

I think this falls into the category of “Yes, they MIGHT be authentic, but monkeys MIGHT fly out of my butt.”

Sheetwise, I don’t see how you can say that one memo works “perfectly” without any aspect ratio change, but the other works “perfectly” with an aspect ratio change. Our forger seems to be really careful about some things and not about others. Or went to the trouble to photocopy some of the memos multiple times, or on a different photocopier. For a forger moronic enough to use MS Word, he seemed to be really careful about multiple photocopiers and whatnot.

Another blogger said that another memo worked well if you set the type size to 11.5 points. Great. Our mysterious moronic forger is not smart enough to go find an old typewriter, but he does change the font size from document to document.

Myself, I have had no luck with any of the other documents besides the one that LGF analyzed originally getting them to break the same way in Word as in the CBS photocopies.

As for margins, leading, etc. those were deliberately set on Word to the most common settings on typewriters. The standard for margins and whatnot for the business letter of 1972 is still the standard form on Word.

The tab stops match because Word’s default tabs are every half-inch. I seem to recall from high-school typing that the standard business-letter tabs are also on a half-inch boundary. It’s not that Word has a single tab-stop way on the right side of the page, as some have alleged. It has stops every half-inch, and you have to hit tab 8 times or so to get to the tab stop used on the memos.

What else? We’ve established definitively that:

- There were readily available typewriters that had proportional spacing.

- Some of those typewriters used Times-like fonts (not surprising, as it was and is the most popular serif face in the world).

- Some typewriters had ‘th’ keys.

We don’t know if there were typewriters with both proportional spacing and ‘th’ keys, which to my mind is an important and useful bit of info. We also don’t know if those proportional-spacing ‘th’ keys were raised above the cap height. But given that these typewriters were trying to emulate typesetting, I would guess they would, in fact, raise the th above the cap height.

We also don’t know if any of the proportional typewriters had a font that matched the spacing of Times New Roman pretty closely. Some bloggers and self-styled type “experts” have called that impossible, but I don’t think so.

The thing is, as mentioned above, Times Roman and its variants were and are the most popular serif fonts in the world. If you were designing a proportional spacing typewriter, you would almost certainly want it to reasonably approximate the spacing of Times Roman, within the limitations of the typewriter technology.

If you look at the actual advance widths of Times New Roman TrueType font on Windows, you find that there are only a handful of different widths for the characters. Unlike a proportional-spaced typewriter font, the widths aren’t all simple integer proportions, but they’re fairly close.

For example, just looking at the lower-case letters in TrueType Times New Roman, b, d, g, h, k, n, o, p, q, u, v, x, and y all have the exact same advance width: 1024 units.

i, j, l, and t all have the exact same advance width: 569 units.

Here’s the whole table:

ijlt: 569
fr: 682
s: 797
acez: 909
bdghknopquvxy: 1024
w: 1479
m: 1593

You can see immediately that the letter widths are close to proportions of 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 15, and 16 units. I know that these are the same widths as PostScript Type 1 Times Roman because Times New Roman for Microsoft was specifically designed to match PostScript’s Times New Roman advance widths. And PostScript Times New Roman was licensed from Linotype, which was one of the original licensees of Times New Roman in the 30′s. So the advance widths of Times New Roman on Windows (and the Mac) are derived ultimately from the widths used by a hot-metal typesetter – the Linotype.

It’s important to note that whether the widths are exactly the same or not between two typestyle variations, if the average character width is the same or very close, and the proportions (the ratio of individual character widths to the average) are the same or very close, one would expect a line of text to lay out very similarly.

Now, Palatino or Bookman would not lay out very closely, because the proportions are different and the average character width is different. Thus the lines would not break the same and would not have the same lengths.

But if you’re talking about the most popular font in the world, it’s not too hard to imagine that both the average width and the proportions would be super close – close enough that overlaying two different renditions of the same text would look very similar.

And in fact, that’s what we have. The two look very similar. To the lay person, they look “identical.” To me, they look very close, but not identical. The ‘nth generation’ nature of the CBS scans is part of the problem, but it’s hard for me to imagine how Times New Roman from a laser printer could become those images no matter how many times they were photocopied.

The bottom of the 7 and 9 consistently drop below the baseline on the CBS documents. They don’t in Times New Roman. The lower case g has a smaller top. The 8 has a smaller top.

What fax or photocopy machine has the capability of consistently making the top of a lower-case g or an 8 smaller, and consisistently extend the bottom of the 7 and 9 below the baseline? Stretching I can understand. Blurring I can understand. But consistently altering the letterforms?

In the end, I find the similarities between the Word documents and the CBS documents to be a “thing that makes you go hmmmm…” In other words, it looks suspicious. But after looking at this hard, I don’t find it completely convincing. The thing to do is to actually either find a real typewriter than can repro this text (which could be hard, considering the number of years) or find other memos from the same office that are acknowledged to be good and look similar.

Or conversely, demonstrate definitively that no typewriter of the time actually had a matching typeface. Again, that’s a tough job considering the time involved.

But this idea that there are features in this memo that technically could not have been done on a typewriter – that’s 100% horse patootie. Technically speaking, every feature I’ve looked at could have been done IBM Executive-level technology. Could an actual IBM Executive have done it? That’s the $64,000 question, isn’t it?