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The second one looks better, but your letters are still too tall. The width is pretty dead on, but the height of the letters is about 10-20% off.

My question is, if this is really supposed to be a computer, how come nobody as yet has been able to completely NAIL the font choice?

Looking at the blown up images, the baseline variation and especially the break in the lower-case G make me think Typewriter.

I can't imagine a computer font that would manufacture a defect like the broken tail on the g, and it does it consistantly on at least 2 of the g's, so it's likely an artifact of a physical typewriter.

Posted by: Bruce at September 16, 2004 06:11 PM

"The second one looks better, but your letters are still too tall. The width is pretty dead on, but the height of the letters is about 10-20% off."

The height is different because the fonts are different. That's the point.

"My question is, if this is really supposed to be a computer, how come nobody as yet has been able to completely NAIL the font choice?"

The font is a Times variant. Scroll down to the illustration of the 5s. As far as I know, Times is the only face that has that 5. If you can show me another, I'm real interested.

Try to understand that the mean issue is character width. Everything else is malleable, as we've seen, but character widths go back to lead. It's a discrete measurement.

"I can't imagine a computer font that would manufacture a defect like the broken tail on the g, and it does it consistantly on at least 2 of the g's, so it's likely an artifact of a physical typewriter."

Then all the "g"s would show it. It's an image regeneration artifact

Posted by: Jules Siegel at September 16, 2004 06:27 PM

I still think Press Roman is a better match fontwise.

All the news reports said that Times New Roman was not in the Haas Atlas database of typewriter fonts. But nobody has ever said whether any other Times Roman variants were in the database. Are Press Roman and Aldine the only ones?

Posted by: barbarosa at September 16, 2004 07:06 PM

Having worked in more offices than I'd care to count and having closely examined hundreds of thousands of printed and copied pages (as a proofreader), my experience is that the height of text on a page is very easily messed up by photocopying.

The "baseline shifts" and various letter degradations evident on the memos is also a common feature of multiple photocopying.

I haven't seen the curly bleeding serif artefact before, but I can imagine that it may also be a plausible effect of photocoping a few times.

Maybe someone could print out the MSWord reproduction and photocopy it a few times on poor quality paper to see what happens...?

Posted by: lucid at September 16, 2004 09:15 PM

The image degradation is not (at least not primarily) due to photocopying but rather due to scanning, both from the fax machine scan and the later computer scan.

As soon as you fax a hard copy of a document (not faxing directly off a computer), you've made all the letters irregular--and not identically irregular. Depending on how square the paper goes through (it was a little crooked) and how high a resolution the fax is set to, it gets worse. Make sure your fax is set to the lowest res for maximum degradation (usually they're labeled "regular," "fine" and maybe a "superfine" res).

Then, scan the fax back into a computer with a scanner. You've just introduced a more error/irregularity. If you either scan at low res, or reduce the res enough after scanning, it will be really bad. This last is what happened to the CBS memos. They may also have been photocopied in between at some stage or another, which would have made the problem even worse--to the degree that's even possible.

So, every letter is different. The baseline wavers a bit. No suprise. We're not looking at an original. This is an effect of the image degradation from being scanned twice at low res. This is why many of the arguments based on letter shape are pretty dubious.

If you want to test it, type a memo in Times New Roman. Fax it to yourself (make sure the fax guides are loose enough that the paper can twist just ever so slightly). Get it scanned back into a computer, and then drop the resolution to 120 dpi on the final image. It will look a heck of a lot like the CBS memo at this point. Absolutely no need to use a typewriter (or a degraded font) up front!

All that being said, the point that each line ends on relative to the lines above and below is something that does not get very much distorted by this whole process. That's why, as a font expert, I chose to focus solely on the widths. The "Virtual Composer" font I did matches the relative unit widths of *all* proportional fonts on the IBM Composer, because they all use the same widths. It would be physically impossible to produce that memo on an IBM Composer, with Press Roman or anything else, and get that exact spacing.

(Note: Unless you actually changed the space width between words regularly and deliberately, specifically to match the relative line endings results of setting in Times, which you could only get by actually setting it in Times in the first place, which is kind of circular.)

Basically, there's just no way you can get consistent matches between the line endings (indicating the relative line widths) of an IBM Composer and the common version of Times. The one has letters that are 3-9 units wide, where 9 units is ~3/4 of the point size (roughly). Times is based on widths that for regular characters are 5-17 units wide, where the point size is equal to 18 of those widths units.

What's that mean? No magic combination of letter widths on the Composer can match the letter widths of Times when setting more than one or two lines of actual text. Certainly not the one and only combination of letter widths the Composer actually has. That's what I've been proving through my various tests. You'll see more stuff posted soon.

The IBM Executive typewriters did proportional spacing, but use an even coarser system of widths, and are even more thoroughly out of the running. And nobody has yet named another typewriter available at the time that could did proportional spacing.

There are a couple of other *relatively* typesetting machines, but they're both absurdly improbable to have been used, and nobody has yet pointed at technical data that suggests they could match the memo (like supporting an 18-unit widths system).

At this point, the preponderance of evidence against the authenticity of the memos is incredibly high. At the moment, the only devices we know of that were available around 1972 that we *know* could have done it were high-end typesetting machines that cost a small fortune to own and to operate. Given that, the burden is on the "pro-memo" forces to come up with a specific device and demonstrate its capacity for producing the memos.

Cheers,

T

Posted by: Thomas Phinney at September 18, 2004 01:36 AM

Great work Thomas et al.

I see now CBS is agreeing with you.

I appreciate the critical eye you brought to this issue.

Posted by: Bruce at September 20, 2004 01:22 PM