Posted on 09/09/2004 3:47:33 PM PDT by GOPcapitalist
(scroll down to the bottom of the article for the update section):
UPDATE: NEW PROOF OF FORGERY
Following the Little Green Footballs blog lead, CB decided to test the pantograph replication technique on another of the CBS documents to see if it held true. Using Microsoft Word on its factory default settings with 12 point Times New Roman font we copied the address line of CBS memo #1 and overlapped the two for comparison.
As you can see the test worked and, in doing so, inadvertantly uncovered more proof that the document is a forgery. The new evidence revolves around the fact that Microsoft Word auto-formats its text using the centering function. When the text alignment for “center” is selected each subsequent line will be precisely centered underneath the previous one with each word of the text readjusting to meet this alignment as new letters are entered into the line. Since typewriters mechanically stamp letters onto a sheet of paper one at a time, it is physically impossible to create a mechanical typewriter document that perfectly aligns two or more centered rows of text on top of each other. The address bar on CBS Memo #1 is perfectly centered and perfectly aligned, thus it had to have come from a computer word processor and not a typewriter. The replication experiment in Microsoft Word with an identical match further validates this origin.
If you had a typist who could do centering using proportional-spaced fonts, I'd like to meet her/him!
CBS News just took an H-bomb up the tailpipe.
Poor Dumbocrats!!!! With "His Lyingness" being in the hospital....they just can't get away with lying anymore.
Yes, but you centered by hitting the spacebar repeatedly. This would not permit you to perfectly center the text. For example, assume the text was 1.8" wide. To center it on an 8 1/2"-wide piece of paper with a 2" margin, you'd have to space in 2.25" minus 0.9" = 1.35". If there were 12 spaces to the inch, your two choices would be spacing in 16 spaces (1.33"), or 17 spaces (1.42"). Given three separate lines with three separate widths, this would result in the lines being imperfectly centered.
A laser printer, on the other hand, doesn't have to space in increments of 1/12th of an inch. It aligns the text with 1/300th of an inch precision. We'd have to take a ruler to the text in this example to be sure, but eyeballing it it looks a lot more like 1/300th" precision than 1/12th" precision. The poster has made a great catch here.
How could somebody be so stupid as to even attempt to pass something like this off?
Yes, that was certianly easy to do, IF YOU DON'T USE PURPORTIONAL TYPE!
To do the same with purportional type, you would have to compute the exact spacing for every letter, and space over the exact amount INCLUDING FRACTIONAL "SPACES". Old purportional typewriters could backspace less than one "real" space.
It may not have been possible at all to create this document with a typewriter, IF it proves that not even these sub-spaces will work exactly.
BUSTED!
This is hard-core proof!
It is hot too difficult to manually center lines using an old proportional typewriter. As a typist, you would know the pica or width value of each letter. A lower-case 'm' for instance, might be worth 5, while a lower-case 't' might be worth 2. As I recall, the widest of all letters on the old IBM Executives was 7 (upper case W). Then it's just a matter of totalling the value of each letter, adding an average of 3 picas between each word, dividing by 2, finding the center point, backspacing the required number of units, and then typing the line. The typist had the freedom to add or subtract units between words (or even units between letters in a word) so as to make an individual line or word come out "right." I have done this exercise hundreds, if not thousands, of times, in my old life as a "repro" typist in the 1970's.
On other thing, the 'backspace' key on these typewriters moved the platen back just 1 unit. I.e., to backspace over an 'm' would take 5 strokes, over a 't' would take 3 strokes.
All of this is just to say that I am becoming convinced the Killian document is a forgery. While it is definitely possible to manually center individual typewritten lines, it seems implausible to me that such lines typed 30+ years ago would somehow exactly duplicate the same exercise of today's word processors.
Sorry to be so long winded.
Sometimes I get weary reading some of the trivial tripe that passes for commentary on Free Republic and lament the days gone by when the Giants of Discourse roamed Freeperland. But, on days like this, I am reminded of the true value of Free Republic.
They cannot lie, they cannot hide, they cannot distort and deceive. Why? Because of Freepers like you who come forward and stand tall when the times demand and lay out the truth for all to see.
Thank you, sir. Thank you
Exactly. Remember going to the center and then backspacing to try and get everything centered? And, if you had an odd number of letters it was never perfect! Now I'm showing my age...LOL
You gotta wonder. Then again, how could somebody be so stupid as to vote for John Kerry? We see examples of the latter every day, and therein you find the answer to the former.
Not likely, since the improbability drive was replaced by Bistromathics. Plus, the sum of the improbabilities of Old Media actually being unbiased and truthful exceeds infinity minus 1.
Game, Set and Match. This is going to backfire soooo badly on both the MSM and Kerry. Idiots all.
"On other thing" = One other thing
In all fairness, back in the stone ages we used to center on mechanical typewriters all the time. It's just that the typist did the math rather than having the computer figure it out. :-)
That's exactly true, and if it wasn't necessary, I didn't do it.
I'm like everyone else here on FreeRepublic, hung up on this exciting bit of news. Sure hope this evidence sticks.
While skeptical at first about the forgery issue, I'm now convinced. I didn't even think about the centering. It's so commonplace to use centered paragraphs these days that you don't even notice it. Apparently, neither did the forgers.
CBS News AKA Weekly World News.
"60 Minutes should be canned and Dan Rather FIRED immediately. Then SwiftVets get 1 hour for every week until the election."
The punishment should fit he crime.
Abuse of the first amendment to defraud the electorate is criminal.
All CBS hat aired his deception affiliates should have very stiff FCC fines imposed. Individuals in the decision chain to produce and air this document should face criminal charges.
I recall doing that, but I also remeber it worked out if you had an even number of letters in the line but not for an odd number of letters.
I tried this. I counted 34 characters in the line
111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron
That puts the center between characters 17 and 18, if monospaced. ("t" and "e")
Then I counted 14 characters in the line
P.O. Box 34567
That puts the center between characters 7 and 8 ("o" and "x").
Draw a line between "t" and "e" on the first line, and between "o" and "x" on the second. The lines don't meet.
Bookmarked for later
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