[Current draft]
By Jules Siegel
Folks, you know that if Yellow Dog Democrat Jules Siegel tells you that they are fake, they are fake.
How bad an election can it be when typography is a national issue? My faith in the utter absurdity of human nature is restored.
Now comes Thomas Phinney, Program Manager, Fonts & Core Technologies, Adobe Systems. This guy is my ultimate typography guru. I got to know him during the conversion of Adobe's entire line of type to a new format called OpenType, which was one of his main responsibilities. This kind of work makes rocket science look like Lego.
Until the advent of OpenType, a given font of a typeface was limited to 256 characters. OpenType fonts have more than 65,000 characters, finally making it feasible to set Chinese on a computer, among other typographical wonders.
Without consulting any mathemeticians, I feel confident in saying that setting proportional type implies an underlying order of complexity that would be represented by a Very Large Number approaching infinity. No one uses all that complexity all at once. There is more to be written about love than would fill all the leaves of all the trees that ever were or yet shall be. Yet it all ultimately boils down to "I love you."
The physical length of "I love you" when set in type depends on the character widths of the typeface you use to set it.
In proportional type, each character occupies a unique discrete space. An "l" is thinner than an "m." Every "l" is the same width as every other "l in a given font." Every "m" is the same as every other "m." The same goes for every character in the font. They are Legos. Sentences with identical character sets will always come out the same length, just as a given set of numbers will always add up to the same total.
[Jules asks himself here, what about word and letterspacing?]
Speaking for himself alone and not for Adobe, Phinney observes, "The incredibly bad reproduction of the memos makes it hard to state many things definitively. But one thing that is not degraded by the reproduction is the simple question of relative line lengths. Where does each line end, relative to the lines above and below it?"
"Given proportionally spaced fonts, and a large enough sample (as these four memos are)," he continues, "these line breakings offer a sort of digital fingerprint of the widths of the font used. The memos precisely match current digital versions of Times (and previous phototype and hot metal typesetting versions), but they do not match the IBM Composer fonts, nor do they match any version of the IBM Executive)."
From what I know about type (plenty, believe me, at almost 69, after having begun at 14) I am fully satisfied that this means that the memos could not have been created on either an IBM Selectric Composer or an IBM Executive typewriter. Since these would be the only devices that Jerry Killian could have used in 1973 to produce his memos in a proportional typeface similar to Times, they are fake.
I'll have more on this tomorrow. Meanwhile, let's look at Phinney's detailed reasoning.
The number of possible character widths was much more limited for the Composer (all characters were 3-9 units wide) and the Executive (all characters were 2-5 units wide).
It is worth noting that the digital versions of Times available today are all based on an earlier 18-units-relative-to-height ("to the em" in font-geek-speak) system. So while they have relatively discrete widths for common characters, these widths are at a "finer grain" than early typewriters or low-end typesetters of the 70s such as the Executive and the Composer.
Today's digital versions of Times have widths that descend from those used in Linotype's phototypesetting and earlier hot metal versions (source: correspondence with John Warnock and direct testing). Monotype had previously had a version with different widths, but when Microsoft licensed their version, they wanted it to be compatible with Adobe's, so the widths were changed to match the Adobe/Lino versions. Thus all the main digital versions of Times used today have the same widths.
(1) The IBM Composer proportional fonts all had the same relative character widths, regardless of font design. Thus there is in essence only one "fingerprint" for the Composer fonts. Times matches the memo fingerprint, but not the Composer fingerprint.
Contrariwise, given a couple more hours, I can do a digital version of a Composer font (since I have the widths info). This would allow me to do "virtual Composer" simulations and prove in the reverse direction, that the relative line lengths set with the virtual Composer are quite different.
(2) The IBM Executive did not offer switchable fonts, so you literally had to buy a different typewriter to get a different proportional font. None of them is particularly close to Times.
Posted by jules_siegel at September 13, 2004 03:47 PMYes, please let me know when this article is posted....
LINDAELLIS@AOL.com
Please let me know when article is posted. Thanks. Good luck regarding Hurricane Ivan.
Posted by: Brian Churchill at September 13, 2004 09:24 PMMore compelling to me is a genuine memo from around the same time, co-signed by Bush and Killian, typed in courier font and looking for all the world like an early 1970s document should look.
If I was going to fake a 1972 memo, and I know nothing about the military, about office hardware in the 1970s, or about typefaces... if I wanted to fake a 1972 memo, the first thing I'd do is set my font to Courier. That's what you use when you want to make something look old.
I don't understand why the forger didn't use Courier.
Posted by: lucid at September 13, 2004 11:43 PMRegarding faking a 1972 document using Courier, you'd get busted pretty fast. "Courier" has changed substantially with the technology broadly available.
Before daisy wheel printers, when Courier was used it was fairly dark, bolder if you will. It had to be, because if typefaces weren't fairly bold, the typewriter's impact would penetrate the ribbon and the paper. When daisy wheel printers came along, they couldn't reproduce the weight of the original Courier because it took too much impact to evenly spread the ink, which would shatter plastic daisy wheels. So "Courier" slimmed down mightily, becoming what would have previously been the equivalent of a "Courier Light."
After laser printers came along, "Courier" and "Courier New" never switched back to the original typeface's heaviness. The original weight of Courier was closer to a current TTF typeface called AmeriType.
Bottom line: if you want to forge typewriter-written documents, use a popular typewriter of the relevant period, or even better yet, a typewriter model and typeface known to have been used in the particular office. You'll still be susceptible to challenge because of differences in adjustment or wear in the original typewriter's face.
Posted by: marbux at September 14, 2004 02:44 AMYes, I guess that's really what I meant: why not just use a contemporaneous typewriter.
Methinks the forger was working for the other side...
Posted by: lucid at September 14, 2004 06:34 AMTo be honest, if I were forging a memo like this, the first thing I would do wouldn't be to look at any font at all - it would be to take a memo of the same providence, scan it in at 1200x1200, and then rebuild it in a graphics editor *using the correct characters from the correct layout paper* before printing it on a laser printer and claiming it was a photocopy of the original...
This is not only a fake, but a careless and unskillful one. either the faker is working for the "wrong side", or was a whitehouse aide who thought throwing something like this out via MS Word would "fix" the problem for long enough to get the election out of the way.
To be honest, before we had the internet it *would* have been good enough - what would the odds have been pre-internet that this many people, with contacts like an Adobe font expert, would have had access to the document and an interest in persuing it?
Posted by: Dave Howe at September 14, 2004 08:55 AMKillian's secretary is interviewed here:
http://www.drudgereport.com/bushtang.htm
She says the opinions are real but the memos are fake.
Unbelievably, it appears she wasn't asked what typewriters they used in the office.
Posted by: lucid at September 14, 2004 09:10 PMOf course the bad forgeries are fake.
Next question: whodunnit?
Think motive and opportunity. Looks like another of Karl Rove's dirty tricks. First, who benefits? Obviously (when the hoax is disclosed), Bush, whose critics are discredited. Then think misdirection. Who will be blamed? Obviously Kerry's people. Thus, typical of covert dirty tricks...always with a "cover story" that points in the exactly wrong direction.
Clever, Carl.
Posted by: jackl at September 15, 2004 04:59 AMI don't claim to know who would do this, but Jackl's reasoning to attribute blame is rather specious. One could argue that someone did it to make everyone think Rove did it and discredit them. But Rove could have done it to make people think that someone else did it to make people think that he did it. But then again someone might have done it to make us think that Rove did it to make us think that someone else did it to make us think Rove did it to make us think.... You get the point.
Again, I don't have a clue who did it, but we could sit here for an eternity spinning this to another depth of hell. Basically we'll all conclude that whatever side we don't like is the one that did it. There is nothing in what we know to tell us one way or another. Maybe Rove did it, maybe Kerry did it, maybe Lee Harvey Oswald did it, maybe space aliens did it, maybe *I* did it, or maybe someone who is outside the political process who wanted to make an impact did it.
Basically, unless Jackl has access to something beyond what the rest of us do, there is no point in speculation about who did it at this point.
Posted by: Arle Lommel at September 15, 2004 02:19 PM