Oh yeah, I'm sure there was one in every TANG office...NOT
Posted on 09/11/2004 1:46:40 AM PDT by The Bandit
The font is not as important as the justification, which just wouldn't have happened on an ordinary typewritten memo, typed by a man who had neither a type writer nor typing skills.
Oh yeah, I'm sure there was one in every TANG office...NOT
You must have read my mind. From what I've read so far, even with the Selectric composer, trying to do all the stuff that's been identified as suspicious would take a lot of work in centering and shifting of balls for superscripot etc.
A video of all that would be VERY interesting and could probably go on national TV. You might win a prize or be able to sell it. GO FOR IT!
The spacing may be the same, and that is a sign of computer generated text, but as to the overlay matching exactly, the resolution of the overlay images is too low to see an exact match. You cannot see from that whether the serifs, and minor differences in the fonts match exactly.
If you look at the original image of the "forgery", and compare it to the MS Word Times Roman, you can see the differences in the serifs (that is the tags at rhe ends of the character strokes.
I'm not saying that the "forgery wasn't computer generated, I'm saying that the font isn't Times Roman, unless it's been severely distorted by being recopied several times.
Yes, I see the spacing is a match, but not the font. The link you referred to used Linotype Palatino, not Times New Roman.
Probably, the matter of the actual font used will only be resolved when a good image of the original is provided.
It's a TrueType TNR set using MSWord defaults. They do match perfectly. I created a .pdf of my copy and superimposed it on a light table. Matches. The alignment of the superscript against the character matches the original. I've seen the same with image matches.
Other programs such as WordPerfect cannot match this document using their default settings.
Finally, looking at the document created by the IBM, the letterspacing and letting is off. In order to adjust the alignment, the operator has to do a lot of time-consuming, and unnecessary work.
I've done composition as a typesetter for many years. I know MSWord pretty darn well, and I certainly know the multiple variants of the Times family of fonts.
Take it elsewhere.
I dunno, I've been doing composition for twenty years and I could spot on the screen that it was Times New Roman.
It actually is a good image. I can clearly see the character attributes.
The lines aren't justified; they're flush left, ragged right, with consistent wordspacing.
One thing I have noticed, however, is in the 04 May 1972 memo, in the first enumerated item, it appears that the author could have fit the word "May," within the ostensible margins. However, because he neglected to put a space between "May," and "1972" the line appears to have been broken automatically after "1972". That suggests a machine capable of automatic line breaks, which would only have been available on a machine capable of doing complex calculations.
To put it more simply: no matter how sophisticated a composition machine might be, the only way it can distinguish between one word and the next is by the word spacing--that tells it when one word ends and the next begins. A human operator knows that "May,1972" isn't a single word, but the machine doesn't. Because "May," and "1972" are strung together, it treats them as one word and breaks the line because there isn't enough space to fit the whole thing before hitting the margin.
Therefore (if you've followed me up to this point) it appears on the face of it that the 04 May 1972 document was produced either on a sophisticated typesetting machine capable of mathematical calculations, or a modern word processor.
I'm not too sure you can go by the memos as they've been presented to the public, because they're much larger than a standard page. The best you can do is extrapolate what the original margins of the document were set at and work from there. I imported the PDF image into Adobe Pagemaker, and scaled the page down proportionately, assuming (and this is only an assumption) that the left and right margins would have been one inch wide. When I did that, and printed out the result, I measured the linespacing with a typesetter's clear line gauge, and found the type to be 12 point on exactly 14 points of leading. This would be a very conventional setting for text type produced either by a word processor's default or a typesetter. It was very standard to set text type with leading that was two additional points beyond the font size. In fact, I once had a small typesetting business which I called "Ten on Twelve," which was a way of saying "ten point type on twelve point leading"--a standard for many, many professionally typeset books.
Fourteen points is the ostensible default for type set in twelve point. In fact, that's just what MS word defaults to, with the line spacing set on single.
"It actually is a good image. I can clearly see the character attributes."
And you're sure its Times New Roman?
Yep. True Type, to boot.
What font do you think it is?
Awesome.
Bump to the top.
Killian's son says that the only typewriter in the office was manual, not even electric, let alone sophisticated.
That makes sense. I can't see why anyone would want to use one of those "personal" composition systems for regular office work. Everything I've seen suggests they were for people who wanted typeset-like appearance for extensive in-house publications, where going through the extreme trouble of doing it yourself would have been preferable to paying a professional compositor to do it. For regular office work they would have used a simple typewriter.
"Yep. True Type, to boot.
What font do you think it is?"
That's what I don't know, but I will bow to your professional judgement.
Who put that together? ....that is awesome!!
No, unfortunately you're right. They never were able to get the exact feel, but it was certainly closer than anything else. I used a Selectric for a number of years in a college library, and I've got a cousin who was a secretary for years and LOVED her selectrics.
Thanks so much for the info!
Mark
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