September 14, 2004
Is it a fake?
Umm.
Click to enlarge.
[Updated Sep. 15, 2004 6:50 a.m.]
Oops. Thomas Phinney writes: "Pfeh, I realized today that the Composer featured variable-width spaces, and that the space wasn't even in the width table that I copied, so I didn't get it quite right."
It's a microscopic issue that doesn't affect the alignment. He's going to fix that.[Update: See newest versions in stories above.] Meanwhile, given today's news from Killian's secretary, we get to have it both ways. The memos are fake; the information real. Isn't the Internet great!
I created the image in much the same way as the one in "Replicating the superimposition," using Thomas Phinney's Virtual Composer font, but I carefully move dthe lines of the Virtual Composer image to line up vertically with the CYA memo.
As you can see, the line endings are very close, so close that any variations can be explained as image generation artifacts. Allow me to quote myself:
I am not going to go on record as convinced that it couldn't be done on a Composer because I am afraid that someone will do it and make me look like a fool.A statement from IBM that no Composer font balls ever had superscript "th"s would be the strongest evidence that it could not have been used. Show me that and I will heartily agree that the memos could not have been created on a Composer.
Anything else is conjecture. My position is that it's all conjecture. I'm comfortable with that. I'm very uncomfortable taking a definitive stand one way or the other, because either one could blow up in my face.
Comments?
The characters don't look the same. This document was not done on a computer. That much I'm certain of. No computer font has been able to match the characteristics of the font in the document. Until someone accounts for why the characters cannot be duplicated on a computer, every similarity they point to is meaningless.
It boils down to this. If this is a computer generated document, then it should be easy for someone to make another computer generated document that matches it exactly. So far nobody has reproduced the document.
Posted by: Robert McClelland at September 14, 2004 01:10 PMTo my eye, the 8s match, the 3 matches, and the Ss (both cap & lc) match. You could not say the same for the Word-generated text in Times New Roman.
To me, this is crucial: Times New Roman does not appear to be an exact match. So what similar font is available for Word, and why wouldn't it be Times New Roman if it was done in Word?
Posted by: barbarosa at September 14, 2004 02:14 PMExcept for the curly serifs, it looks like Times New Roman to me. People have talked about specific letters and numbers not matching up, eg. the thickness of the cross stroke on the 8 or whatever, but if you take any letter or number from the memo (eg. 'e') and look at all its occurrences - it looks different every time. This must be due to photocopying.
Maybe someone could photocopy (on a bad machine) an MSWord document several times and see if the serifs start to bleed.
I have wavered back and forth these past few days but I just can't accept the coincidence that an MSWord document lines up so precisely with this one... and then there's the errors in the content, too. If the forger *had* had the sense to type this on a 1972 typewriter, I still think the documents would be suspicious because of these other errors.
Posted by: lucid at September 14, 2004 08:04 PM