Posted on 09/11/2004 10:10:33 PM PDT by Catphish
I don't usually talk about politics in my journal, but I just can't help it in this case. This CBS forged memos thing is just absolutely hilarious and sickening at the same time. I've been glued to the computer over the past few days reading everything there is to read.
I've been very interested in all of the technical explanations and the many examples of comparisons between the memos, including the exact match between one of the memos and the exact same thing typed in Microsoft Word and the inexact match between one of the memos and the exact same thing typed on an IBM Selectric Composer.
Through all of this, there's been much talk about kerning, which is where pairs of letters in a certain order are closer together than they are when they are in the opposite order. However, no one has actually done an analysis of the document with pictures to prove that there is kerning, so I decided I'd try it in Photoshop.
I downloaded the documents from CBS, and opened up the one dated August 18, 1973. Then I picked a letter pair that kerns in Microsoft word, but doesn't kern (or at least not as much) in the opposite order. I found several instances of each letter pair in the document and pasted them into a new document so that they would line up. Here are the results:
Both of the ta sets were lined up by the leftmost line on the t and the right most line on the a. This was somewhat difficult because the document has been copied so many times that the all of the letters look slightly different. However, I'm certain that it is exact enough to prove my point.
Likewise the three at sets were lined up by the rightmost curve of the a and the rightmost line of the t.
Then the leftmost characteristic, the slash of the t on the ta pairs and the curve of the a on the at pairs, of the two different sets were lined up with one another. Then a line was lined up with the rightmost characteristic of the ta pairs to see if it lined up with the rightmost characteristic of the at pairs.
Obviously it does not. The line actually intersects with the next letter after the at pairs. The at pair is thinner than the ta pair. This is kerning.
As an example, I did the same thing using 12 pt Times New Roman font in Word.
Here again, it is obvious that there is kerning. Since this image has not been copied over and over, we can see the source of the kerning: the tail of the a is under the slash of the t. If you look at the at pair in "coat" from the memos, you can also see that the tail of the a is under the slash of the t.
NO TYPEWRITER CAN KERN because the typewriter does not know what letters are next to the letter you are typing when you type it. A word processor on a computer can do that, because it makes adjustments to what you have typed previously as you go. A typesetter can also do this because they can have sets of letters on the same block.
No typewriter wrote this memo. The only other options are that the document is a forgery, or that Killian sent out his personal memos to file to a typesetter.
Yet another nail in the coffin.
By the way, I also wanted to do an analysis of some typewritten text from an IBM Selectric Composer to prove (for absolute morons) that typewriters can not do kerning, but I can't find an example in good enough quality that has both the at and ta pairs. If anyone comes across anything, email me at raina at rainabear dot org.
Kerning is an adjustment to letter spacing atop of the base letter spacing as determined by the font. For more details: http://www.coolhomepages.com/cda/kerning/
There was a good example of an IBM selectic composer done here on FR earlier. I don't have a link.
BTTT
I posted one last night but it doesn't deal with "kerning":
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1212910/posts
Thanks for the link, what I gather is the kerning is embedded in the font, and is not typewriter or computer dependent? Is that correct? So does that mean a typewriter does kern if it has the same font as Word?
This is called "overhang" and it can be achieved on a typewriter - it is just a font feature. The point is that typical typewriter did not use fonts like this circa 1972. Now, there existed IBM Composer, that looked like an electric typewriter, but was able to use fonts with overhangs. The docs are forgery for sure, but the real reason is not any particular feature, but the exact match with MSWord. This exact match is virtually impossible to achive even with IBM Composer, especially 30 years ago (;-)This was debated to death already, just look up my and other people's earlier posts on this topic
That was the one I saw. Hey at least you know people are reading it.
No, a typewriter never kerns. I think even IBM Composer couldn't kern. You need a professional typesetting system for this. But the forged docs do not have kerning anyway, as far as I can tell!
Just sent Raina a couple of scans of memo's. One dated 72 and the other 73. Certainly IBM Selectrics; don't know if they were Composers.
Looking at the ta and at pairs, there's clearly no kerning.
Ok now I understand where you're at, so what do you call the spacing changes from the link? The author calls it kerning, if it isn't that what is it? Just normal font spacing? tia
And, as you said, that "match" in the line spacing, and the page breaks, and centering, etc. with Word was more than enough to convince me. No way that could be a coincidence.
No, actually he's correct. In the days before kerning, many fonts had letters which would extend beyond their start and escapement points. The effort was to compromise between the correct letter spacing for e.g. "YY" and "AA" [which should be wider] and "YA" and "AY" [which should be narrower].
To test for kerning, it's necessary to have a kerning pair of letters which appears in both orders, with identical letters to either site.
For example:
AYAY ffYYIf the letters are kerned, the second line will be slightly wider than the first. At least on Firefox, the two lines appear the same width. The two "A"'s and two "Y"'s on the second line will touch each other slightly if the fonts are not kerned, though it's not too bad. But look at "fY". On a properly-kerned font, the letters should be separated. But without kerning not only do the letter spaces overlap, but the letter forms themselves do. If someone had an "f" and "Y" in lead type which projected past the outsides of the main type blocks (I have seen lead type which did that), one would have to put a small spacer between the letters to avoid damaging them.
AAYY fYfY
The point is not that the forged docs can be detected to show kerning, but that the Microsoft Word exact reproduction does have kerning. That is, the only way the spacing of all the letters would be the same (between forged docs and Word) is if the forged docs were produced with kerning. What am I missing in the logic?
Another smoking gun is that Staudt was retired for over a year before he's referred to as pressuring Killian in one of the memos. Uh Oh, LMAO!
No, Word exact reproduction does not have kerning! (Kerning is an optional feature in Word)
No, just left overhang and right overhang. Consider the following examples in "Courier New" [a font everyone would agree is not kerned]
IMMI mwThe top example on the left appears narrower than the second, even though both contain the same letters and there's no kerning. Further, if you look at the examples on the right you will notice that there is overhang between the letters shown even though, again, "Courier New" is not kerned.
MIIM Aw
By the way, many typewriters did have characters which extended far enough left and right to overlap adjoining characters if typed in the right sequence. Kerning is not the issue. Overhang is not the issue. What is the issue is that the document matches Word's default behaviors so perfectly.
So the blogger is making a valid point even if she has asymetrical positioning of the letters confused with kerning. It rules out all the other kinds of type writers outside of the Composer I suppose.
I would like to see a list of companies running ads on CBS News. May everyone should start making noise about how they are supporting fraud.
No, the point is that Time New Roman is preprogrammed "kerned."
Go to
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customization/CreateATemplatePart2.htm
where one reads,
Back in the days when paper was expensive, publishers searched for ways to make the letters smaller and smaller and pack them closer and closer together, so they could fit more words on each sheet. The end-point of this game was the Times Roman font. This was commissioned by the London Times to pack the most information possible into its narrow columns. The letters are packed so tightly together (kerned) that some letters actually overlap each other. A full copy of Times Roman contains “f-ligatures”. These are single characters that print two or three letters because the letters actually overhang each other: they had to be cast on the same block of metal to get them that close together. They typical ligatures are “oe” “fi” “ffi” etc. If you examine them, the tops of the “f” overhang the dot of the “i”. Times Roman was an extremely elegant, good-looking font that has since become probably the most popular font in the world. Times New Roman is the same thing in a True Type variant, kerned slightly less tightly so it doesn't need the ligatures. Times New Roman is Word's default font.
So in trying to explain the spacing, line breaks, and vertical letter positioning, kerning is one of the major points.
Don't trust just any info on the web you can find. They confuse (close)letterspacing with kerning, but these are different things.
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