A quiet place

Not much happening in Font Wars right now. But check back soon for a complete report on what happened when I asked InDesign users to submit typographers' jokes.

Font Wars makes FreeRepublic.com

BostonHerald.com - the Edge: Taken at (type)face value, memos provide a font of info

Taken at (type)face value, memos provide a font of info
By Stephanie Schorow
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
[Excerpts]

Typegate hit the blogosphere like Ivan crashing into Louisiana and took down the house that Dan Rather built.

Typegate is Divaspeak for the uproar over memos aired on "60 Minutes II'' that purported to show President George W. Bush shirked his National Guard duty in the 1970s.

A good place to start is Font Wars, found at . Blogger Jules Siegel -- a self-described "Yellow Dog Democrat'' who thinks the memos are faked -- is beside himself with glee that so much attention is being focused on typography.

His site examines the documents from all angles with good links to other sources. "How bad can an election be when typography is a national issue. My faith in the utter absurdity of human nature is restored,'' he writes.

[Someone on freerepublic.com noted that the URL error is so "Old Media." In other news, Jules Siegel and Font War are mentioned on freerepublic.com.]

What is this font?

The image below from http://peterduncan.net/CBS_Documents.html (scroll down) is a memo that was released by the Pentagon.

I think that Bill Burkett has the original documents. When he reconstructed them he made some significant errors in nomenclature and style because he's Army not Air Force.

If he releases the originals, the story gets even bigger, doesn't it?

Washington Post wrap-up on memos

In Rush to Air, CBS Quashed Memo Worries (washingtonpost.com)

Click image to see full-size annotated graphic time-line.

Tests run by Thomas Phinney, fonts program manager for Adobe Systems, show that none of the possible font widths available on any typewriter or any IBM device from 1972 are able to produce an exact replica of the CBS documents. "Can they do something 'similar'? Sure," Phinney said. "Could they produce those exact memos? Impossible."

[Excerpt]

It quickly became clear that the people CBS hired to authenticate the documents had -- and claimed -- only limited expertise in the sometimes arcane science of computer typesetting technology and fonts. Such expertise is needed to determine whether the records could have been created in 1972 and 1973. Independent experts contacted by The Post were surprised that CBS hired analysts who were not certified by the American Board of Forensic Document Examiners, considered the gold standard in the field.

These software experts say differences in font widths and printing styles make it impossible to replicate the CBS documents using the printing technology available in the early 1970s. By contrast, reasonably competent computer enthusiasts have created nearly exact replicas of the documents in 15 minutes employing default settings for Microsoft Word and the widely used Times New Roman font.

While Glennon continues to insist that the documents could theoretically have been printed on a Vietnam War-era IBM Selectric, no one has been able to demonstrate this . Leading font developers say the technology simply did not exist 30 years ago.

One telltale sign in the CBS documents is the overlapping character combinations, such as "fr" or "fe," said Joseph M. Newcomer, an adjunct professor with Carnegie Mellon University. Blown-up portions of the CBS documents show that the top of the "f" overlaps the beginning of the next letter, a feat that was not possible even on the most sophisticated typewriters available in 1972. Newcomer calls the documents "a modern forgery."

Tests run by Thomas Phinney, fonts program manager for Adobe Systems, show that none of the possible font widths available on any typewriter or any IBM device from 1972 are able to produce an exact replica of the CBS documents. "Can they do something 'similar'? Sure," Phinney said. "Could they produce those exact memos? Impossible."

Welcome to Font Wars

Font Wars began on Newsroom-l. I've moved the files here in the expectation of a possible surge in server load as the word gets out. In the next few days, I will be adding more images and analyses exploring the fascinating story of "Font Wars: How Dubya Got Kerned." As you'll see we have contributions from Adobe's Thomas Phinney and other folks with awesome expertise in the art, technique and history of digital typography.

I'm hoping that this very specialized blog will evolve into a general gathering place for people who love type. This is all so exciting that my little heart is going pitter-pat. Kerning on the Evening News? I never thought I'd see that in my lifetime. I mean, it never even occurred to me. How could it?

New Bush Guard memo overlays

Virtual Composer font designed by Thomas Phinney to duplicate the characteristics of IBM Selectric Composer fonts.

Click on image to enlarge (261 kb). Then continue for comparison image.

Click on image to enlarge (237 kb).

Which one is the better fit?

LA Times confirms Drudge on Killian secretary

Ex-Guard Secretary Recalls Memos Criticizing Bush
By James Rainey

George W. Bush's commanding officer in the Texas Air National Guard wrote memos more than 30 years ago objecting to efforts to gloss over the young lieutenant's shortcomings and failure to take a flight physical, according to the officer's secretary. But Marian Carr Knox of Houston said the memos unveiled by CBS News were forgeries, not the ones she typed at the time.

Killian's secretary says memos are fake, information real

TEXAS GUARD SECRETARY SURFACES: SAYS CBS DOCS 'FORGERIES', BUT STANDS BY ACCUSATIONS AGAINST BUSH

[Excerpts]

The DRUDGE REPORT has found Lt. Col. Jerry Killian's former secretary who claims that the Texas Air National Guard documents offered by CBS in its 60 MINUTES II report filed by Dan Rather last week are indeed 'forgeries'.

"I typed memos that had this information in them, but I did not type these memos.

Knox speculated as to how she thought the forgeries were created saying, "My guess is that someone in the outfit got hold of the real ones and discussed it with a former Army person."

"What really hecked me off was when it was somebody on TV, associated with the White House, who said that all of this information was lies. And I got excited at the time because I knew that I had typed documents with this information because a person like Bush stood out from the others -- because of his association with his father."

Asked about reports that Lt. Col. Killian's wife and son saying he didn't type, Knox stated, "He didn't need to. He had me."

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?

They are fake.

[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.

Replicating the superimposition

One of the principal arguments for the forgery side is that by simply typing the text of a memo into Word using the default settings, you will get an exact letter for letter match. I tried this and found it to be more difficult than claimed, but feasible. In the interests of journalistic integrity, here's my latest try:

I exported the CBS CYA memo as a Tiff. I did not try to fix any rotation problems.

I went back to the Word memo text. I made sure to put double spaces in the same places this time. This caused the text to format completely differently from the CYA memo. My default margins turn out to be 1.18 in., maybe because I am working in the Spanish-language version of Office, which is based on centimeters, or because I changed the defaults to picas and when they converted to inches the came out 1.18.

I reset the margins to 1.25 and 1 in. The text formatted correctly. I don't know if these are default Word settings. They are standard secretarial correspondence settings, though.

Then I made a PDF of the same thing in Word. I didn't print it out and scan it because I am getting tired of it all. Given the quality of the original scan, it's good enough. I rasterized it in Photoshop at 144 dpi, the same as the CYA memo export. The difference in vertical spacing is a faxing effect, I'm sure, as is the rotation. The two images were drastically different in size. I reduced the Word image to fit the CYA memo measure.

So this is a point for the forgery side.

The only way to solve the puzzle is to see the original documents. Even high-resolution scans are not going to resolve all the questions. A physical test will easily determine if they were printed with a carbon film ribbon or a laser printer. CBS is going to stonewall on that. Therefore the argument falls into the category of phenomenology. There is no physical evidence, just digital images whose provenance can never be determined by visual inspection.

Do not fall in love with any given hypothesis. This is a swamp. Nothing is real. At the moment, CBS holds all the cards. If they have decided to crush Bush, it's Nineteen Eighty-Four. It's not like they don't have the resources to create anything at all that they want or need to do it.

In 1977, Mike Salisbury showed me the originals for Marlon Brando's dossier in Apocalypse Now. They were on screen for seconds. They were absolutely perfect as far as I could tell. They didn't look like stats. They looked like actual documents -- an article from Life magazine really stood out. I think he may have had it printed on a small offset press, but I will have to ask him to be sure.

Given the poor quality of the scans, I don't see how anyone can definitively show a space in front of a th. It's like the kerning. I don't see it. The rest is maybe. You can't have it both ways on the scans. If the inconsistent apostrophes are generation artifacts, then I will argue that it's not valid to compare them with 100% accurate laser output.

My typography guru is convinced that it wasn't done on a Composer. A lot of people who have worked on Composers are claiming that it would have been entirely feasible. They say that Composer font balls with superscripts were available, both on special balls with many other symbols, and also hybrid balls that had standard typographical refinements, including fractions. The Composer had automatic centering. They also say that IBM routinely made custom font balls.

Now that I've actually matched the Press Roman letter forms to the memos, it will take a lot to convince me that they could not have been created on a Composer.

You can't say that Killian wouldn't have known how to have operated a Composer. It's well established that he never used a typewriter. Neither does Bill Clinton. Does that mean that his correspondence is fake?

Now let me drop a name: Chester Anderson, the founder of The Communication Company. I went to the print shop in Mendocino in 1973 looking for someone to type a book-length manuscript. They sent me up to see Chester. I said, "The Chester Anderson?" He responded, "The Jules Siegel?"

I gave him the manuscript and he said he would give me an estimate on typing it. I came back a few days later and he had set half of it in type. He loved the book and just whaled into it. Why set it in type? "It's all the same to me. This is the machine I use for everything."

I later worked on that very Composer in Mendocino in 1975 after Chester quit. That's how I learned to set type. I used Press Roman because it was the closest to real type. I wrote my Playboy story about Thomas Pynchon on it and also another called "A Modern Romance" that appeared in Chic. The owner used to give me letters to do because he liked the way they looked.

You can look at this in two ways:

[1] Jules/Chester = Killian/Operator

[2] Owner/Jules = Killian/Operator

If you can't shoot down the Composer theory on the basis of the physical evidence, such as it is, you have to argue not just that it's unlikely that he had access to one, but show historical evidence that he didn't. That is not going to be a trivial task.

No arguments based on superimpositions are valid, not even mine, because the scans have no evidentiary value. My images are visual aids. They aren't any kind of proof. The scans I am now using were extracted from the PDF with Acrobat 5 as TIFFs. They are beyond fucked.

When my typography guru got very heavy about the mathematical impossibility of creating the memos on a Composer, I wrote an update agreeing that they are probably fakes. It would be a great thing to send out. It wouldn't embarass me at all. It shows my devotion to truth and integrity, exactly my favorite image.

Once I actually fiddled with the Press Roman specimens, I got the very strong feeling that it was looking very possible to recreate these memos on a Composer. Gerry Kaplan came really close. To fully satisfy myself either way I would have to sit down at a Composer and try it 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.

I think it will dissolve into a he said she said argument. Kitty Kelley is next. That's going to be a lot more interesting than fonts.

We are on Tropical Storm Warning in Cancun right now. Hurricane Ivan is going to brush us tomorrow. It's already begun to rain in fitful torrents and the front door is leaking. Tomorrow is going to be an absolute mess. I hope it stays on the current forecast track. Otherwise we will be in the soup. I just dread the thought of being evacuated from the Hotel Zone.

Font Wars become quite trivial when you look at the satellite images of Hurricane Ivan bearing down on your home, believe me.

Posted by jules_siegel at 10:12 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Hmmm.

Now look here:

Some rather abstruse mathematical arguments may be forthcoming about character widths, but I think this image makes a compelling case for Press Roman used on an IBM Selectric Composer.

According to my typography guru, the narrow W is a characteristic of typewriter fonts. You can see this in the first image, where the MS Times Roman W is distinctly wider than the W in Press Roman.

Yet the Ws line up very well when superimposed in the memo scan. Admittedly, this is not a scientifically precise demonstration. The scan is awful. After a certain point in reduction, similar typefaces begin looking identical. The width differences between the two Ws are probably not strong enough to survive the effects of scanning and reduction.

The shape of the 5, however is very distinctive, and it matches just about perfectly. In general, the letterforms of Press Roman are a good match for MS Times New Roman.

Until high resolution scans from the originals are made available, this is going to be difficult to refute on mathematical grounds. The mathematics don't apply because too many uncontrolled and unknown variables have entered.

A Selectric Composer replica

As you see there are some anomalies, but it really does begin to look as if the memo could have been produced on a Selectric Composer with a font ball that had the superscript "th." Here's what Shape of Days says about this:

The IBM Selectric Composer

Typing "IBM Selectric Composer" into that search site took me to the aptly named ibmcomposer.org, which describes itself as "the only site on the Internet completely dedicated to the IBM 'Selectric' Composer line of typesetting machines." The site, which is run by Gerry Kaplan, includes information, scanned user manuals, and photographs of the only working IBM Selectric Composer I've been able to find. And, fortunately for me, it also includes an e-mail address.

When I first heard back from Gerry, I felt a little bad for having bothered him. He'd been fielding calls and letters all day, he told me, including an inquiry from CNN. But he was a trouper, willing — enthusiastic even — to help out.

I asked Gerry, in a fit of hubris, if he wouldn't mind trying to reproduce a sample from one of the CBS memos on his Selectric Composer. Just over an hour later, he emailed me back a sample, typed up on his Composer using the 11-point Press Roman type ball and scanned into his computer.

[Update]

People are wondering why I would use this item and link to The Shape of Days site when it contains supposedly devastating rebuttals of Gary Kaplan's replica. What do I care what he says? I can pick apart any of his arguments. The replica was a hurriedly created sample. He's comparing ridiculously distorted scans with original copy. As you've seen, I make the opposite case, using the same material. He needs too much verbal exposition to explain what his images mean. Mine speak for themselves. They don't prove anything, but I don't claim that they do. They just demonstrate my doubts in a compelling visual aid that could easily be displayed on a TV screen. You don't even need my voice over explaining what they mean.

My fundamental argument there are too many style inconsistencies in the memos for them to have been composed in MS Word. That may not make sense on TV, but it makes perfect sense to anyone who's actually used Word, especially someone who also happened to use electric typewriters. Word automatically irons out inconsistencies. The defaults in Word are a pain to change, even if you've managed to do it occasionally. You have to poke around in options and preferences dialogs.

The opposite is true of devices such as the Selectric Composer. You always have a choice of using superscript or regular "th"s, curly and straight quotes and apostrophes. It's extra work to make the typographically correct choices. You have to use a different key or key combination and/or change the font ball or daisy wheel. Therefore if a document shows inconsistent style choices, it is more likely to have been composed on a device thatrelies on operator choice than MS Word.

Font wars hit prime time

By Jules Siegel

634 words

"TV ads that are saying "the memos are fake" or "Kerry's isn't a hero" are the main focus of the campaign right now," comments High Times contributing editor Preston Peet in the course of a very spirited discussion about the disputed Killian memos on newsroom-l, one of the Internet's principal email discussion lists for journalists.

"It's sick, to put it mildly," he observes.

To me, it's not all that bad, because I think that campaign ads are the distilled reflection of the candidates' personalities. The discussion brings this out even further. The real question under scrutiny is whom do you trust. Moreover, because I have devoted my life to type, whether as a journalist or a graphic designer, I am happy that TV screens are filled with discussions of arcane font identification details and the capabilities of the otherwise forgotten IBM keyboard devices at which I spent much of my youth.

If they ever ask me to go on TV to explain the difference among MS Times New Roman, Linotype Times Roman and Monotype Times New Roman, I will ask them to display the interesting visual experiment now featured on Newsroom-l.

Look what happens when I match up the scan of a date from one of the Killian memos (blue) with the same text composed in Word in MS Times New Roman and Bembo, laser-printed at 300 dpi and scanned at 300 dpi. Bembo was designed by the legendary British typographer Stanley Morison, who also created Times New Roman for the Times (London) in 1931. Judge for yourself which one fits better.

Most of the case against the Killian memos rests on the claim that the typeface is MS Times New Roman, which was not available on typewriters in 1973, although other versions of Times were. My general impression is that this is way too tricky to call without seeing the original documents or, possibly, excellent scans. At the same time, after very close study, I don't think this is MS Times New Roman. It's not Bembo either, but it could be a bastard version that I think combines elements of Times and Bembo (or a similar face). It might be either Aldine or Press Roman, which were created by IBM for the Selectric Composer.

A world-reknowned authority on type who wishes to remain anonymous at this time assures me that based on his mathematical calculations of character widths (an unerring type identification fingerprint, he says), the memo face is MS Times New Roman. He's probably right about that. In a media urination contest, however, which will be more effective -- a mathematical formula or a visual image?

When it comes to trust, Bush just got hit with a faceful of unrecycled horse manure. It's worse than the Swift Boats. Kerry had plenty of documentary and eyewitness evidence to demonstrate not only that they were lying, but also that he was a hero.

Here the preponderance of the evidence is that Bush never showed up for duty, even if you discount the Killian memos, which are now related to the category of hearsay. Arguing about the authenticity of the Killian memos just keeps bringing the subject back to four little letters: AWOL.

It is possible that the documents were forged. If so, maybe some Democrats learned a lot from the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. I don't approve, but it does make me smile.

I was talking about some of this with my beloved bride, the beauteous Anita Brown. She's more conservative than I am. I mentioned the right wing argument that this is all old stuff, that even if Bush committed youthful indiscretions, they have no bearing on the election. She replied, "If he is to be forgiven for his youthful indiscretions, why should the youth of today go to prison for the same offenses?"

--
Jules Siegel is a writer and graphic designer whose works have been published in Playboy, Best American Short Stories, Library of America's "Writing Los Angeles," and many other publications. He administers Newsroom-l, one of the Internet's principal email discussion lists for journalists.

A picture is worth a thousand words

Look what happens when I match up the scan of the memo date (blue) with scans of the same text composed in Word in Times and Bembo, laser-printed at 300 dpi and scanned at 300 dpi.

Authenticity backed on Bush documents

By Francie Latour and Michael Rezendes, Globe Staff | September 11, 2004

[Excerpts]

Philip Bouffard, a forensic document examiner in Ohio who has analyzed typewritten samples for 30 years, had expressed suspicions about the documents in an interview with the New York Times, one in a wave of similar media reports. But Bouffard told the Globe Friday that after further study, he now believed the documents could have been prepared on an IBM Selectric Composer typewriter available at the time.

Bouffard, the Ohio document specialist, said that he had first dismissed the Bush documents because the letters and formatting of the memos did not match any of the 4,000 samples in his database. But Friday, Bouffard said that he had not considered the IBM Selectric Composer. Once he compared the memos to Selectric Composer samples, Bouffard said, his view shifted.

In the Times interview, Bouffard had also questioned whether the military would have used the Composer, a large machine. [Note: It's not a large machine. It's a little bigger than a standard Selectric. --JS] But Friday he provided a document indicating that as early as April 1969 the Air Force had completed service testing for the Composer, possibly in preparation for purchasing the typewriters.

As for the raised "th" that appears in the Bush memos, Bouffard said that custom characters on the Composer's metal typehead ball were available in the 1970s.

"You can't just say that this is definitively the mark of a computer," Bouffard said.

It's not Times Roman

It's not Bembo either, but probably Aldine, a knock-off that was one of the fonts used on the Composer. It might also be Press Roman, but I've been unable to locate a specimen so far.

Bush Guard memo "forgery" a hard sell

[Go to Main for latest updates]

Right wing sources argue that the Killian memos are forgeries. They claim that they use proportional characters that supposedly weren't available in 1973.

Proportional characters were used on IBM typewriters as early as 1941, and became widespread after 1950, when the Executive model was introduced. Below, an ad for the IBM Executive published in 1954.

.

Although the Times New Roman face used by MS Word as the default font is superficially similar to the typeface used in the memos (because both Microsoft and IBM were inspired by Times Roman, one of the most successful commercial typefaces of all time), it is not identical. The numbers are especially different.

They also allege that the memos use "smart" (curly) quotation marks. I see a couple of possibly "smart" apostrophes. As you can see in the ad, this was a feature of the IBM Executive, a surprisingly sophisticated machine, typographically, that I used while working in public relations 1959-60. The most damaging evidence is the superscript "th." If the IBM Executive did not have this capability, the document is subject to considerable doubt until the issue can be resolved.

I'll be interested in comments from other typographers on this.

[Note: In response to a comment on the Newsroom-l mailing list, I have recreated the text in Word, printed it out and scanned it. The original memo is a very bad scan, possibly from a copying machine, but I think the differences in the "g" and the "3" are substantial.