Okay, so now I’m seeing statements here and in this other thread, concerning things like proportional fonts and superscripts, that seem to directly contradict some of these “experts”. And we also have “experts” contradicting each other. My head is spinning. Just how does someone go about becoming a recognized “expert” in typewriters? Is there an institute of typewriterology? (That’s a rhetorical question.)
[quote]
More than six weeks ago, an opposition research staffer for the Democratic National Committee received documents purportedly written by President George W. Bush’s Texas Air National Guard squadron commander, the late Col. Jerry Killian.
The oppo researcher claimed the source was “a retired military officer.” According to a DNC staffer, the documents were seen by both senior staff members at the DNC, as well as the Kerry campaign.
“More than a couple people heard about the papers,” says the DNC staffer. “I’ve heard that they ended up with the Kerry campaign, for them to decide to how to proceed, and presumably they were handed over to 60 Minutes, which used them the other night. But I know this much. When there was discussion here, there were doubts raised about their authenticity.”
The concerns arose from the sourcing. “It wasn’t clear that our source for the documents would have had access to them. Our person couldn’t confirm from what file, from what original source they came from.”
[quote]
The article says that the documents may have come from the Kerry campaign, and that CBS ran them even though there was internal dissent about whether they could be legitimate. If so, this should be a pretty big scandal. First, that the Kerry campaign would feed forged documents to the media, and b) that said media would report them without also reporting their own serious misgivings about their authenticity. Heads should roll.
On the other hand this is the American Spectator, so any claims which appear to harm Democrats should be taken with a grain of salt.
But this is certainly turning into an interesting story, no matter how it turns out.
As for those seven minutes of aWol’s petrified, wanted-his-mommy terror, one thing an honorable, conscientious, intelligent, compassionate man could and would have done is to realize he was a primary target and so get the hell away from those kids!! Instead, that chicken-hawk anti-hero aWol forced those children to be his human shields. That’s George W. Bush all the way: setting up the weak and the defenseless to pay for his cowardice and recklessness!
Have you ever seen the film Dead Zone? Seen the scene where a press photographer catches the cowardly president holding up a little child in order to protect himself from a sniper? We need Time to run a similar cover showing George W. Bush with a circle of young children while he cowers there for seven minutes with his borrowed human shields protecting him. Yes, indeed.
More to the point, Airman, if aWol Bush and his shamefully and perhaps deliberately heedless administration would have listened to the bipartisan Hart-Ruddman reports – as further emphasized by Diane Fienstein and several other Democrats – that terrorist attacks were planned for within the continental US since May 2001 (in fact, Senator Hart emphasized it quite loudly about 6 days prior to 9/11), those two towers would probably never have fallen and your beloved “president” wouldn’t have been the second-most culpable person for the attacks behind bin Laden himself.
Umm… ambushed,
I think you might be in the wrong thread.
I do not know too much about typerwriters, I do know fonts pretty well ( I used to hand letter my ad-art roomate’s projects, it was fun!) I am a tech for a company that rents computers, printers, and fax machines (I mostly deal with computers myself).
I do not have MS Word, it will not run on my o/s, so I grabbed the pdf from CNN (thank you, Squink) and the MS Word gif from LGF (thank you, Sam). As has been said before, the PDF is awfully degraded. I suspect a fax and the process of making the PDF, rather than a copier, caused most of the horrid distortion. The gif is also not really hi-res enough for meaningful comparison, either. You have zoom in a lot to really see if they line up correctly. If I ever see a higher res of the PDF, I will type one up at work for better comparison.
With those caveats, I would say that the PDF does not really look like Times New Roman to me. The letter shapes look similar, but Times New Roman’s line width varies. The font in the PDF looks as if it does not vary much at all, at least not consistently (compare the capital M).
In addition, when I do the overlay, it does generally line up. But the kerning in the PDF looks more irregular, and many letters are a bit off in either direction. I could not get feedback to line up at all on close inspection. The leading is also more irregular * looking* than the MS document.
My wife is a graphic artist for a printer. She looks at signs going down the road and tells me what fonts they are. I will ask her to look at the PDF and see if she can determine what font it may be. What I * REALLY*want though, is better documents to compare.
Y’know, this whole bruhaha could be avoided if we could just produce somebody who saw GeeDubya Bush actually reporting for duty at the time in question.
As it is now, watching the Bush apologists play Encyclopedia Brown and pretending they’re all instant experts on computer typography in a desperate attempt to cover George’s ass is just humorous.
Sorry, I forgot to mention: since the gif was low-res, and I do not have MS word, I compared individual letters to the 22pt TNR supplied with XFree86.
I’m trying to understand why a DNC staffer would have talked about this to the American Spectator. And it does seem a little too convenient that they were able to get this story out in such a timely manner.
From the article (bolding mine):
I’m honestly starting to think that this is a strong possibility. But why would the American Spectator bring up this possibility? Curioser and curioser.
Font reflow, spacing, kerning, is supposed to be precise. Precise to the ultimate degree. When you have a 400+ page doc, a hairsbreadth of difference in a single letter can make up lines or even pages of difference. Word processing has had to deal with designers who want that degree of control (though I’ll admit we don’t always achieve it, particuarly with newer fonts that may not have set standards, or in word, which cannot always support out requirements. But the whole point of word or desktop publishing was to try to reproduce that sort of consistency, even if they don’t always manage it. If there is any font that will be that consistent, it will be the great grandaddy of Times New Roman–unless they’re using some funky TNR just for that typewriter or something.). I’d have to take a look at your overlay doc, but I wouldn’t much trust a 72 dpi reproduction to accurately reproduce a doc…nor a 144dpi, nor a 300dpi! Not to the degree of determining forgery for sure, though obvious modern fonts could be ruled out. The differences between one font and another can be very subtle, particuarly between sister fonts or differing versions of the same fonts. There could be a TNR for IBM that is just the same as the Whatever typewriter except for the serif in the lowercase n. I have one client for whom I have to use one particular version of Garamond rather than another, because one has a particular angle to the apostrophe and the other doesn’t. But I’d bet on a low-res repro you’d never know the difference.
And if wishes were fishes…
Would I prefer a clean campaign on both sides? Absolutely. But the hard, cold facts tell us that our fellow Americans respond passionately only to mud and dirt. The Democrats’ convention was by far mostly positive, forward-looking, and clean but it got them nothing in terms of voter support. The Republican convention was virtually all evil, scum, hatred, and vicious, bile-filled attacks by dozens of at least temporarily insane demagogues. It was like a Christmas orgy in Hell, emceed by Zell On Earth and Ann Coulter. And it got them plenty of new voters.
Until that distant day that our fellow Americans suddenly find themselves actually applying reason and enlightened self-interest to choose candidates, slinging mud will – oh, so sadly – continue to be what works. As deplorable and despicable as that is.
Please see post #24 to see what I was responding to.
Thank you for addressing the question in a serious manner. :rolleyes:
OK, so, say Bush leaves right away. Can he stop the attacks? No. Are the kids out of danger? No, because anyone who would go through all the trouble to plan an attack like that will complete the attack without regard to factors that are out of his control. What, if he somehow found out that Bush had run for his life he would turn the plane around and try to ram Air Force One? Not likely, and as it happens irrelevant because it never happened. There was no threat, the kids were safe, and nothing happened in those seven minutes that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
And one other thing. I am sick to death of you clowns calling Bush “my President”. I am not voting for him. Got that? Good. Try to remember next time.
I tried just that and the two documents don’t look very similar in the details at all. I’m no expert, but I’ve read a lot about typewriters and their idiosyncrasies in the context of evaluating the reliability and authorship of the so-called “MJ-12” papers as well as the Alger Hiss spy case, in which the tiniest details of typewriters were explored in tremendous depth.
The CBS pdf files seem to show all the hallmarks of a typewriter. Note the spotty crookedness of some individual letters: a printed Word document would not have these. Note also the widely varying amount of ink among the individual letters: No Word doc would show these traces. The differences in the key-press force applied are visible, where the very same letter sometimes shows lightly and others more darkly.
As I said, I’m no expert. But those CBS pdfs seem overwhelmingly to me to be the product of a manual typewriter with a human typist. The forgery advocates have to explain how a computer printer shows all the signs of a manual typewriter, which I strongly doubt is possible.
There can’t be any visible differences in key-press force on a freakin’ electric typewriter.
No, you’re not.
Yes! The odds are thousands of times greater that they’d be out of danger if he left!
Are you unaware that some Arabs in a van tried to claim (without evidence) that they had an interview with the president that very morning and tried to get in to see him (they were turned away)? And that an identical-looking van was spotted with weapons? Any sensible person would see in that the very strong possibility of the existence of a mobile assassination unit. The plan would have been to take out the president and his immediate staff through direct, line-of-sight fire, but as you yourself suggest, a backup plan might well have been to take out the whole school if the president didn’t leave quickly enough.
In short, there was every reason to believe that the president’s presence posed a terrible threat to those kids, and that a good and brave man would have gotten away from those kids immediately!
Your curious points about how nothing actually happened in no way alleviates the president’s cowardice and/or thoughtlessness at that moment in time! Surely you’re not claiming that the president was psychic, are you? That he knew that nothing would happen if he just stood there in all his cowardice?
No? Then he was an indecisive coward. QED
First, I didn’t claim it was a “freakin’” electric typewriter. You did! Look, for example, at my closing sentence: “The forgery advocates have to explain how a computer printer shows all the signs of a manual typewriter, which I strongly doubt is possible.”
I realize that most people here have suggested it was an IBM Selectric, but I’ve seen no compelling evidence to establish that it was necessarily typed on an electric. Given all the things I and some others have pointed out (that you foolishly ignored in order to get your insults out), including:
(1): The word doc I carefully produced and the CBS documents don’t look very similar in the details at all, even at such low resolution.
(2): The spotty crookedness of some individual letters: an electric typewriter might or might not have this problem, but a printed Word document would NOT have these.
(3): Note also the widely varying amount of ink among the individual letters: an electric typewriter might or might not have this problem, but a printed Word document would NOT have these.
So, fella, your attacks and insults are off base. Unless you can prove that these were prepared in Word (and explain how all those glaring, manual typewriter-like flaws were produced by a computer and a computer printer and why) or you can prove that they were typed on an electric typewriter, I’ll stick to my own suspicion that these appear to have been typed on a manual typewriter.
Settle down, sport.
If it was produced on a typewriter, it can only have been done on an electric. You must have missed all that stuff about proportional spacing of the letters.
Hi, Mod. If you feel so inclined, can you edit the previous two posts of mine and change the angle brackets “<>” to square brackets “”? Thanks
Well, dammit, I think that does shut me down.
Sorry.
That’s OK, no apology necessary, really. Anyway, let’s pick up where things left off.
The font question on the IBMs is readily resolved:
So Times New Roman was available on the IBM Selectric from the late sixties.
The wingers are going to have to show that none of these IBM Selectrics with Times New Roman were ever used by the Guard.