[Mr Ramsbotham]

When I first saw those memos, I opined on this forum that they weren't Times New Roman, as everyone was saying. I based this on my past experience as a typesetter. What I failed to take into account was the fact that the documents had been reproduced several times; once probably by fax. The resultant "gain" tended to make the characters look representative of a font style called "square serif," of which Times Roman most definitely is not a member.

Then I tried an experiment in which I ran off a duplicate of the memos, produced in MS Word in Times New Roman, then copied it twice and faxed it once. The result was distorted in the same way as the memos.

But one factor that couldn't be distorted was the unique spacing characteristics, which match identically--IDENTICALLY--with the MS Word default settings in Times New Roman.

In order for the documents to be genuine, the person who produced them would have to have known those default values and painstakingly applied them in a manner in which he would have had no interest in doing.

[fhayek]

The first problem any document authenticator would have to deal with was the copying. As your experiment would seem to indicate, these memos were at least three generations removed from the original. If any case could be made for investigators having to evaluate copies instead of originals, the question I had was, why were the only available specimens third generation copies? The multiple copying indicated to me that someone was trying to hide something. If you are impugning the reputation of the president of the United States, wouldn't it be be incumbent upon you to deliver up originals?

So you are attacking the good name of the president. You offer up third generation copies (a major red flag, because, one would expect forgers to create copies of copies to hide their origin). You are producing documents which were purportedly produced by a man who is now dead. The provenance of the documents is questionable, items mentioned in memo do not correspond with their dates. These documents have not cleared the necessary first hurdles. Now were are to forget all that, and swallow the unlikely fact that theoretically, these documents could have been produced with technology at the time despite fact that no other contemporaneous documents exist from TANG using that typeface. And I haven't even mentioned kerning, the signatures, the problems with Jargon, the lack of a letterhead, and the paper size issue. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Simply saying the documents have been made does not even begin to address the ancillary issues that have been raised.