Remember what Captain Killian said about his father's style of notekeeping... Lt Col Killian is not a typist, he writes in long hand. I presumed that if a note needs to be typed, he'd just write it out in long hand, and hand it to a clerk to be transcribed.

If General Hodges was lead to believe that the memo were handwritten, it would've reconcile with the man described by Captain Killian.

Bill, you've done a great job. Hope you're getting some well-deserved sleep.

Vindication is coming. MSM stories are popping up like hotcakes, with experts just about all against. Someone has procured the alleged typewriter and the results are not pretty. Even the lefty blogs are starting to smell the blood in the water here. My advice to them and CBS: CYA.

IT seems to me that this is simple:

CAn the documents be reproduced on a typewriter from that era. It seems that this has been narrowed down to two possible kinds.

IBM Selectric Composer
IBM Executive

It seems the Composer issue is somewhat resolved by another blog.

I would like to see someone get out an Executive and give it a whirl. For what it is worth my father worked for IBM for 35 years and owned an Executive of this type. He says that while it did have proportional font it didn't look like times new roman. He also said that it would do Centering very well (i didn't get it but he is smarter than me and explained it in detail.) However it would NOT make a superscript and even if it did it would not put the "th" halfway above the line like Word does for a superscript.

Understandably this is hearsay. There are probably plenty of these typewriters around. All you have to do is try it.

As someone who believes the memos are forged:

Just because the memo asserts that Staudt has been applying pressure, and Staudt had been retired, isn't in itself proof of a problem. Retired people can apply pressure, too, especially if they pull strings.

I ignore all the he-said she-said stuff associated with both the Kerry-and-his-medals and Bush-and-his-service stuff. That's probably why I'm enjoying this forged memo silliness: it's an actual piece of evidence that can actually be forensically evaluated for truth or fiction.

OK, quick rundown from what I know from doing graphic design, type layout, etc for almost 10 years.

Typefaces have ascenders, descenders, and a baseline. They can be serif or sans-serif.

Kerning is the horizontal spacing of type. Leading (pronounced
ledding) is the vertical spacing of lines of type.

Ligature is when two or more characters intersect in an artful way that adds to the presentation of the type (think fancy headlines in ads). Crashing is when characters intersect in ugly unappealing ways.

I've been using DTP programs since the early days in a professional capacity going back to the first Macs and other GUI platforms (Commodore Amiga). DTP is *not* word processing. And vice versa. You don't layout print ads for Newsweek in Word. And you generally don't use QuarkXPress to type up memos. A word procesor has very little control over all the physical aspects of the type, DTP has infinate control.

The real meat of this issue is that the memos, when retyped in Word, have the exact same linebreak and spacing as the CBS memos. This is impossible unless the two were produced the same way (which they were, ie, forged).

If you used any other word processor, old or new, you would probably not get the same results. Most people think Word is all there is or ever was, not so.

The business of "professional" fonts is a big business. Fontsets costs hundreds of dollars. The TrueType fonts in MS programs are NOT professional calibre.

Since the dawn of DTP on computers (Macs, then Windows PCs) professional graphic designers have used PostScript fonts. Any type foundry (think font manufacturer) can make any font they like. And there are many cases of the same font name published by different foundries (ITC, AGFA, Adobe, etc, etc, etc).

If it's not 100%, it's not 100%. Who here is old enough to actually have used a word processor other than Word for Windows? Remember importing old WordPerfect for DOS or ASCII files into Word and spending all day to get them "right" again? It would take hours to try and match the printed output of an old programs content with a new program.

Countless times in DTP documents (QuarkXPress) I have had to substitute one foundrys face for another. Say Company A Times being replaced by Company B Times. There are both Time, right? No big deal, right? Wrong. If it's not 100%, it's not 100%. You can do an easy global replacement of one typeface for another. And when doing so with the same face from a different foundry, the results are good. But good is 80-99%, not 100%. Doing this introduces line breaks, word wraps, minor quirks. Because they are SIMILAR but not the SAME face.

The CBS docs are reproducable 100% by the default settings of Word. That means that is what created them. Word. Very simple.

As far as kerning goes. By default word processors don't do it. Hell I only use Word for small things and didn't even know it COULD kern to a degree. because when I need kerning I use a DTP program, not a word processor. In a DTP program like Quark, Adobe PageMaker, Adobe InDesign, type has a default kerning of zero. Oftentimes you want to "tighten it up" some on a global scale from -1 to -5, makes things less "airy". You can kern individual letters in differing measures do layout things exactly like you want. That is what "typesetting" was/is. Every single character was purposefully laid out. So kerning strictly does not apply to the CBS documents as you can't do real per character kerning in Word. What is done in Word is some kind of autosquishing that Word automatically does. But the simple fact is, even typing up the memos in otehr word processors with the same typeface and typesize, they are NOT likely to come out 100% the same. Due to program settings, tab stops, the way the WP works, etc, etc. Sure as heck ain't no typewriter is going to do it. And the IBM model that the lefty loons keep going on about was not a typewriter. But an enduser typesetter for the professional setting of type to output camera ready art for someone to shoot. In the old days to make an ad, you set the type and graphics manually and output a "camera ready" piece that the publisher would then literally shoot with a camera to film/negative. Now you mostly just send them press quality PDFs output from your DTP program.

Leading ("line spacing" in Word speak) is the same. You can lead lines equally, or sometiems tweak lines to adjust for the way words are falling to improve readability or avoide crashing. One line can be physically leaded more than another but due to the interaction of ascenders and descenders, the altered lines LOOK better.

There are kerning and leading options in Photoshop and Illustrator as well. As these are professional graphics programs, like Quark.

And that's the typography angle.

Bill -- one of the memos uses an incorrect acronym, according to a Texas National Guardsman from who appeared on FOX today. Something like OETR (?), where OER was the proper acronym. OETR, he said, was something totally different (and not in use at the time, I don't think) -- a mistake Killian wouldn't have made.

Maybe worth looking into.

Could be passed off as a typo.

the angles here are forensic, and substantially (contrary to Dana's angle above) testimony that conflicts with 60 Minutes' sourcing for credibility.

This has been a fantastic story, and it's let me find new blogs (like this one) in the process.

But I think things have to be escalated.

WE all know what the deal is. The loony people ditch logic in order to defend their position at all costs. CBS in not backing down at this time. But I think it is important that they do.

But the story going into a weekend is trouble. Especially with yet another distracting storm (not that it is for FL). If the other media players are still in lynch mode on Monday, then great. If not, then what. Blog people need to start faxing, emailing, calling, and showing up at their local CBS stations to demand the truth.

I think unlike most "swept under the rug" stories this may have legs. Because the offender is a major TV net, where there is a competitive advantage reason for ABC and NBC to besmearch CBS. Props to ABC it seems for leading. Unlike the Berger story where they could all agreee to ignore it. And it isn't a cable news war with the "blatantly biased, cough" FNC against other nets. Some major dailes ignored it, others like WaPo actually gave it front page news. The pressue needs to stay on the MSM from the bloggers so that they do not let it die until it is fully resolved.

Could this document have been typed with the same typewriter in 1972?

http://users.cis.net/coldfeet/doc2.gif

It is Bush's request for a transfer.

it has proportional type. Looks like it is in Times Roman (New? I don't know) and the letters are kerned.

Also it has the same closed 4.

Why couldn't Killian have used this typewriter to make those docs?

quasi -

I hesitate to get into amateur type analysis (notice my sourcing of an expert and plea for a signed consensus of experts), but that doc does NOT appear to be proportional. Look at the foot of the "i". It looks to be the same width as the other lower case letters.

Not only is it non-proportional, it looks a lot like Courier. (Maybe Courier new.) 12-point, maybe, but I can't determine the scale all that well.

That is, the default on almost every typewriter circa 1980.

You have used a typewriter, right?

www.philsfonts.com

I've been buying fonts from them since before the Web, before they had a website.

You can see any font you like on display. You can see how even the same face (font) from two different foundries is NOT 100% the same. The TNR that MS licensed is UNIQUE. And not 100% the same as other TNR faces.

Have people tried reproducing the document with a word processor besides MS Word?

I'm using OpenOffice. In the default font (Nimbus Roman 12) I got what looks like the same results for the text, once I switched '-quote for '-apostrophe.

My th looks a little funny, I'll admit.

One thing about the memo from quasi's comment

http://users.cis.net/coldfeet/doc2.gif

is that it references POB 34567. Sorry if that has been mentioned many times--hard to keep up with everything.

It definitely does not use proprtional fonts.