[ash-housewares]

Hmmm, in that Democrats.com post he shows a cap of page 3 of the 'Miscellaneous' section of the record from USA Today, which does seem to have a ^th in there--not really superscript (but even then not used consistently throughout the same document).

Is there a consensus yet on whether the ^th is definitively anachronistic? That Miscellaneous page seems to have been produced by completely different equipment.

Regardless, the fact that the dubious origin of these docs will soon be more notorious than their content... is utterly hilarious. Just when you think Kerry HQ couldn't screw it up any more

[ash-housewares]

and btw you can get a very similar effect on any MS Word document by printing it to WinFax, saving the image and printing it out, then putting it in your scanner at low resolution (gives you the dot crawl), etc. etc.

[atomicpossum]

Hmmm, in that Democrats.com post he shows a cap of page 3 of the 'Miscellaneous' section of the record from USA Today, which does seem to have a th in there--not really superscript (but even then not used consistently throughout the same document).

This would be a feature on some typewriters that is not a true 'superscript,' it is a special character. The telltale difference is that the special character stays within the top of the line of type, since, as a character on the typeball/arm, it must stay inline with the other letters to make contact with the ribbon and roller. The superscript in the memo, you can see, reaches above the line of type, which is not consistent with the movement of an aligned die as used in a typewriter. PERHAPS a character could be moved that high on the die, but it seems unllikely, and at least is a significant difference between what the DU'er points out and the original memo.

[RogueIsland]

Is there a consensus yet on whether the th is definitively anachronistic? That Miscellaneous page seems to have been produced by completely different equipment.

The "th" isn't the real smoking gun, and that one's a different format anyway. No, the real smoking gun, for those who've worked with type, is the spacing and line heights exactly matching Word default settings (there was a question about Word's "th", but that has been explained as a difference between the screen display and printed output).