Quote:
Originally posted by bilmore
The stuff on which 60 Minutes and the Globe based all of this new "he disobeyed an order" theme came from someone who looked in a dead guy's private files. Was supposedly written in 1973, and said things like "I'm tired of covering for Bush", or something to that effect. But, seems the font, spacing, and special characters weren't available on typewriters back then, and, if you take a computer with Word, set to the default settings on New Roman Times (developed in the '90's, I think) and type out the memo yourself, you can lay it on top of CBS's copy and it's a perfect match.
It's actually hilarious.
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I haven't been following this story (put me in the just doesn't matter either way category), but I know fonts. Times New Roman was developed in the 80s, based on a couple of Linotype fonts from the turn of the century popular with newspapers and that were in turn based on the 16th century work of several Italian fontographers, not that it matters to your point. More importantly, it's a kerned font, not a monospaced font. Courier is a monospaced font (all letters are the same width, and the same distance apart). Kerned fonts were once only the relm of those with access to a Linotype machine (book and newspaper printers) until the Macintosh created desktop publishing. Typewriters based on stiking technology (an outline of a letter strikes an inked ribbon or film, transfering ink to the paper) are unable to have fonts that are not monospaced. While some typewriters developed in the 80s use a different technology, the ones in the 70s were all strike models. If it was a NG typewriter, it was probably an IBM Selectric.
To anyone with a passing interest on fontography, a forgery that was done on a computer instead of a typewriter would be trivial to spot.
