The Blinne Blog

Eliminating Possible Fonts on IBM Composer for Disputed Documents

The current theory on the left was the disputed memos could have been done on an IBM Composer. There are two (that I know of) fonts that could possibly fill the bill. One is called Press Roman and the other is called Aldine Roman. The first possibility was dismissed quickly by expert Dr. Bouffard, who noticed that the 4's have feet on them. See here for a picture. Because there were no feet in the fours, Aldine Roman was offerred as a possible alternative. This font can also be eliminated. The reason is that the capital J's in the font descend below the baseline. They don't do it in the disputed document. See below:

Download aldine.JPG

Kerning You Decide

There has been much discussion on kerning and the disputed Guard memos. Hugh Hewitt's expert from Rice University noted that the fo combination would be kerned in word processors but not on a typewriter. So, I took him up on it, here's two samples one from one of the disputed documents and the other from the IBM Composer User Manual that was typeset by an IBM Composer. We report, you decide.

Download kern2.jpg

Update: An astute commenter noted that there appeared to kerning in an IBM document. However, this was done by a typesetting program. But, in the same document there contained a nice, clean sample of a "for" produced by IBM Composer. I have updated my pictures with this clean sample, along with the document in question and Word all blown up large. It is now patently clear that this is a fake.

Update: Dr. John Newcomer, one of the founders of DTP, called what is being done above pseudo-kerning or ABC width mechanism. Here's what he has to say:

Some have argued that the documents are forgeries because the characters are “kerned”. Kerning is an operation which tucks characters together to compact space. However, Microsoft Word by default does not kern text. The text of the memo is not kerned. Kerning is a pairwise operation between characters, and each character pair that can be kerned has a specified kerning value. Microsoft fonts and many others come with accompanying kerning data. But kerning is complex, and computationally expensive, and therefore would have slowed down redisplay in a WYSIWYG editor. However, Times New Roman uses a characteristic of Microsoft TrueType fonts called the ABC dimensions, where the C dimension is the offset from the right edge of the bounding box of the character to the next character. If this offset is negative, the character with the negative C offset will overlap the character which follows (in some technologies, the distance from the start of one character to the start of another is called the “escapement”, so a negative C offset gives an escapement which is less than the character width). This gives the illusion of kerning, or what I sometimes call “pseudo-kerning”. I discuss the ABC width mechanism in some detail in a book I wrote in 1997 (“Win32 Programming”, with Brent Rector, Addison-Wesley, 1997, p. 1104). I have attached sample output from a program I used to create illustrations for that book, one of which shows the characters “fr” and one of which shows the C offset of the “f” character is “–2”. ALL technologies I am aware of in 1972 that would have been available for office work (not, say, the sort of production book typesetters that major publishers might have had) could only advance an integral number of units, and could not “tuck in” the characters like Microsoft’s Times New Roman font under Microsoft Word does, by using a negative partial-character offset. Examine carefully the “fr” in the word “from” in the 18-August-1973 memo. The “r” is tucked under the “f” in the same way a Microsoft font does it. In 1972, technology available in the office, including proportional typewriters, could not do this. So it is clear that the only way this document could have been done is using a modern computer font, and the placement is pixelwise identical to Microsoft’s Times New Roman. The work we did at CMU could not support kerning or pseudo-kerning of text. We knew about kerning, but our software could not support it. I have not examined a New York Times of 1972, but I would be extremely surprised if the font used at that time exhibited any form of kerning (I should point out that Linotype machines—the hot-lead machines—had paired characters such as “fi”, which were actually a single slug. Character sequences like these are called a “ligature” and were a special case of kerning. Common ligatures included fi, fl, ffi, ffl, among others. This was an example of kerning built into the font definition, and Linotype machines had separate keys that dropped these slugs into place. Lead type set by hand also had similar ligatures. The illustration is scanned from The Unicode Standard Version 3.0, Addison-Wesley, 2000, p.804).

Hot lead type could not kern, because of the need to have a Linotype machine drop slugs into a frame, which was then filled with hot lead. Any publishing technology that used hot lead typesetting could not support kerning, except by the aforementioned ligatures. Any technology that used hand-set type could not support kerning without such a high expense that it is unlikely it was ever done. Not even Word supports kerning without selecting a special option (and if selected, the resulting document does not look like the memo). But somehow, magically, the font used by some hypothesized piece of equipment in 1972 works the same was as a font that uses a set of ABC width parameters that did not exist until TrueType fonts existed. Microsoft delivered the first version of TrueType for Windows in April of 1992, and the original TrueType font format was developed by Apple and delivered in May, 1991.

Based on the fact that I was able, in less than five minutes, to replicate one of the experiments reported on the Internet, that is, to type in the text of the 01-August-1972 memo into Microsoft Word and get a document so close that you can hold my document in front of the “authentic” document and see virtually no errors, I can assert without any doubt (as have many others) that this document is a modern forgery. Any other position is indefensible. I was a bit annoyed that the experiment dealing with the 18-August-1973 memo was not compatible, until I changed the font to an 11.5-point font. Then it was a perfect match, including the superscript “th”. In 1972, we expressed fonts in integral pixel sizes, and a fractional pixel size would have been meaningless. Until we got high-resolution printers in the 1990s, I am not aware of any application-level technology that supported fractional point sizes (Adobe PostScript could, but the high-level interfaces to it, to the best of my recollection, only allowed integers to be specified for sizes). I do not believe a typesetting program or typesetting technology that worked in fractional point sizes could have existed in 1972 or 1973. However, this might be an accident of the many levels of transformation from the original (wherever that is) and the photocopying, scanning, document conversion, and re-printing. The 11.5-point font could represent a reduction to 96% of the original size in the various transformations. In which case, the coincidence of the match is again extremely unlikely unless the document were a forgery. [Emphasis mine]

So, I have an example of pseudo-kerning. The quote above means that the memo could not even be produced by typesetting equipment of the day, let alone a typewriter. Game, set, match!

The Effect of the New Media on Campaign 2004

Update: This just brewing: the CBS memo on Bush's National Guard service may have been forged. It used a proportional font that wasn't used in the '60s.

The Blinne Blog is back from summer hiatus. I spent the Labor Day weekend watching the political blogs and I noticed how the so-called new media are directly affecting this campaign. Now I am not talking here about Matt Drudge or talk radio or Fox News. No, I am talking about independent web publishers popularly known as blogs. Three stories from this weekend illustrate things that weblogs have done that even the old new media can not do well.

1. John Kerry for President, a 404 Organization.
   John Kerry's web page had a response piece [Note: this link is dead and the index of press releases skip pr_2004_0905a and going straight to pr_2004_0905b.] entitled The 2004 GOP Convention: Four Days Filled With Lies, Mischaracterizations, Distortions, And Half-Truths. This was a cut and paste job that merely quoted from the convention and there was nothing to explain why the statements were lies. Check this link that saved the web page. It also in effect called John McCain a lier.
2. The Steubenville Meltdown.
   Here we have a witness that showed the main stream media completed missed John Kerry's rally going completely out of control. Steubenville is home to a Franciscan university and is very much pro-life. This had to be rescheduled from when the univeristy was not in session to when it was. They also had the rally in a public park. Here's an e-mail from a witness:
   

   John Kerry came to Steubenville yesterday and quickly realized he was in the wrong city. Steubenville is a city where there are 6 Democrats for every 1 Republican, and the Steelworkers unions are alive and active. You would think this was solid John Kerry territory. The mob used to control Steubenville and now the unions think they do. Well, they are wrong.

   The Kerry campaign first scheduled a visit to Steubenville two weeks ago but "scheduling conflicts" came up at the last minute. Oh, and did I mention that Kerry wanted to use a local gun range as a campaign stop, but the owner turned him down? And that the Fire Department Union President told the Kerry campaign that not only would he not organize the union to support Kerry at the rally, but that he was supporting President Bush! The Kerry campaign took for granted that this area was sown up. Mistake number one. So they rescheduled the campaign trip when Franciscan University was back in session. Mistake number two.

   Before Kerry arrived there was a huge pro-life march led by Franciscan University students, 500 strong. "You can't be Catholic and pro-abortion", read some of their signs. Students and members of local Catholic parishes were full of energy and FoxNews reported that this was the largest protest against Kerry outside of the Democratic Convention. Just picture 500 pro-lifers marching from their college campus to meet Kerry. Where else but in Steubenville, Ohio! Though the Franciscan University did not organize the event, it is well known for its orthodox Catholic education which encourages students to put their faith into action. These students simply cherish their Catholic faith and could not stand to let Kerry use their faith as a political prop. I am proud of my alma mater.

   ….The Kerry campaign not only made a mistake in their timing, but they also chose to hold the rally in a public park which should be open to all the public. Mistake number three. The police chief, sheriff, and mayor all agreed with me that protesters and their signs would be allowed inside the Kerry rally site. Freedom of speech is alive and well here in Ohio. The Kerry campaign flipped out!

   So, now add another 500 local Bush supporters to the Kerry rally. They tried to turn up the music but they could not drown us out. According to the Herald Star (local press), "The crowd, estimated by officials as 3,500 strong, was almost split in half with people for and against the Massachusetts senator." John Kerry must know he has a problem when over 15% of his audience was booing him. We were respectful and did not heckle him - but upon arrival and when he sought our applause he got something he didn't expect. As the press arrived a feisty nine year old little girl began shouting, "We want Bush!", and we all chanted along. The campaign staff was beside themselves. This is history in the making! Even places like Steubenville are not supporting John Kerry. He is in serious trouble.

   My friends, John Kerry will not be coming back to Steubenville. Kerry was visibly shaken when he received boos from the audience.....

3. AP Caught in Dirty Tricks
   This one was picked up by Drudge but it was the bloggers who did the heavy lifting. Here the crowd was alleged to have booed President Clinton's heart problems. Audio files came out the woodwork showing it not the case. AP tried to say it was oohing, then deleted the reference to booing altogether along with the by line, the timestamp, and all previous versions of the story. They also purged Nexus of the trail. This goes beyond bias in my opinion and AP should launch an investigation of this.