Posted on 09/11/2004 8:33:19 AM PDT by TheBlindPig
My analysis as a user and teacher of Microsoft Word of why some number letter combinations in the forged National Guard Memos are superscripted and some are not:
Summary :
There were three different types of apparent number/letter combinations in the memos, and they were all formatted in a way consistent with the default AutoFormat As You Type (AAYT) rules of Microsoft Word:
"187th" and "111th" - text that DID follow the rules of AAYT and were automatically reformatted.
"147 th", "9921 st", and "1 st" - text that DID NOT follow the rules of AAYT and were NOT automatically reformatted.
"lllth"/"11lth"/"ll1th" and "lst" - text that DID NOT follow the rules of AAYT and were NOT automatically reformatted becuase the letter "L" was substituted for the number "1".
See extended post here for detailed information.
More evidence comes to light to cause Dan Rather to own up to his promise on Friday night's CBS Evening News to re-visit.
The certainty that these are forgeries has gone from “probable� to 99.99999999 % certainty!
Interesting analysis. I work at a Help Desk supporting MS Word and just figured he toggled the default. (A funny aside -- a co-worker's boyfriend was in the National Guard and she transferred his call to me so I could tell him how to stop paragraphs from autonumbering. Six degrees of separation -- I spoke to someone typing a National Guard document and instructed him about Tools, Autoformat. Small world ...)
Case Closed!
Obviously Killian had access to Word for Windows!!!!!
They must have been experimenting with a Time Machine over there in Houston. It's probably been moved to Area 51.
Somebody Call Art Bell!!!!!!
That's kind of a stretch.
It's more likely that the forger made mistakes and fixed them on a proofread.
For instance, if the person typed "111 Fighter" and then used the mouse to place the curser up behind the "111", then added the "th" and then used the mouse to go somewhere else in the document, the superscript doesn't set.
This also happens when you use the arrow keys to navigate through a document to fix mistakes.
OR
The person was using the undo trick to undo the superscript and simply forgot to do it in the spots where there is superscript.
Type "111th " in Word and then hit Control-Z and then type "Fighter": the superscript is undone.
However, a person savvy enough to know the Control-Z trick is unlikely, upon proofreading, to miss the superscripts that stayed in the documents so I think the "navigating to errors with the mouse and arrow keys" explanation is more likely of the two.
I really doubt they were using lowercase "L"s, though. That just doesn't make sense to me.
Good work, though!
>:P
111th without superscript also results if you use the undo button immediately after Word injects the superscript. Try it.
Yes.....CONTROL-Z is the keyboard shortcut for the Undo button and command.
I said that for two reasons: First, in Times New Roman, a lower case "L" and the number "1" look very much alike. The idea occured to me when I saw some minor variartions in the way the numbers appeared in the doc. True, this could be because of the low quality of the document.
Second, I was trying to account for a logical reason why some of the the characters are superscripted and some are not. Of the number/text combinations that are not superscripted - one of two conditions apply: Either a space was left between the number and the text OR the number ended with a "1".
I am sure all sorts of things COULD have accounted for the differences - but my assumption is that the person making these memos did not know very much about Word. If they did, for example, they could have either turned off that feature of AutoFormat As You Type or could have selected the text, right-clicked, chosen Font, unselected Superscript, and then have clicked on the OK button.
What I am giving you is the most logical reason based on the varations in the text and based on my experience with hundreds of users of Word with limited knowledge. If you have more likely and logical reasoning, I would love to hear it.
For you young 'uns out there, the lower case (L-l) was used as the numeral 1 on early typewriters; they did not have the numeral 1. Ask anyone who transitioned to computer keyboards and they will tell you getting over the habit of typing the lower case L for 1 was hard to break!
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