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!

Comments

[sdfsdf]

Why is your scan so bad?

[Elder_of_Ziyon]

Although the memos are clearly faked, I think the kerning issue is not correct. Word doesn't kern on smaller typefaces and the example shown above is way too fuzzy to conclude that there is kerning - it looks like a single pixel that may be under the overhang of the "f" and that is more likely from the repeated photocopies. Especially the CYA in the other memo is not kerned.

But the memos were created with Word, of that I have no doubt.

[Rich]

The scan was bad because it was snagged from the IBM manual for Composer that used Composer.

[Rich]

The kerning is not done by Word because it is turned off by default, This kerning is actually done by TrueType. Type "for" in for yourself and it is clearly kerned. CYA was not kerned in either document.

[Doug]

Rich,

Go to IBM's website and download the white paper for the Philosophy of Composer Design. On page 7 of the white paper (page 5 of the pdf) you will find a sample block of text from a Composer that's clearer that what you're using. Note that in the letter pair "fo", the "fo" does overlap the "o". The Composer's escapement mechanism does not advance the type the same distance for all letters. Note, however, the section on "Proportional spacing" in the white paper (page 5). None of this has any bearing on whether or not the CBS memos are forged, just an observation on your example.

[Doug]

Glad you updated that. I wasn't really suggesting some kind of special-pair kerning. Just that the overlap exists. This is just due to the amount of horizontal space allocated to the letter "f". I think it's great that there are some real experts out there looking at this all now. I'll be quiet from now on.