Pretty good rebuttal to the nonsense posted above.
http://www.mahablog.com/2004.09.05_arch.html
Even I think I am spending way too much time on the Killian memo issue, but I'm visiting it again because, dammit, I'm an expert. And I don't think they are forgeries.
I studied typography as an academic discipline (circa 1971) as part of the old journalism school curriculum at U of Missouri. I spent roughly 30 years in the book publishing business, most of which was on the production side dealing with type compositors and printers. I have worked with typography and printing processes from the end of the raised-metal-type era to current digital technology. I have designed and written complete type specifications for more books than I can remember.
As a production editor in the 1980s I became especially good at measuring the type in books to be reprinted so that corrections could be made by patching the film. To do that, I had to measure the old type and match font, body size, ledding, and letter spacing exactly. This is not a skill people need much any more, since books are stored digitally. But I still know how to do it.
I'm bouncing around the web seeing wingnuts flying off about proportional letter spacing and kerning and whatnot, and I'm telling you these people are off the wall.
Why? Because, if you need to measure type (body size, ledding, letter spacing) and match it exactly, you have to work with original documents. If you are measuring a photocopy of an original document, the measurements can be off by half a point or more. If you are measuring a photocopy of a photocopy, the distortion grows to more than a point. If you are measuring a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy scanned into a PDF file, e.g. the Killian documents, forget it. The "kerning" and letter spacing you think you see may or may not exist on the original document. Probably not, in fact.
I know this because I learned it from my old film patching days. If all I had to work with was a photocopy, my patch wouldn't match. I had to measure the original printed page.
So, let's dispense with the "proportional type" theory. I've looked at the PDF files, and IMO the quality thereof is too far removed from the original (the wavy baselines are a dead giveaway) to know what the original type proportion was. And any "kerning" one might see is probably the result of distortion that occurs in photocopies that are generations removed from an original.
Now, let's shift focus onto the capabilities of common electric typewriters, circa 1972. As I've already explained, the IBM Selectric was very common. By 1972 the offices of America had replaced old manual uprights for electric typewriters, and the Selectric II, introduced in 1971, was the best.
By the time I graduated college in 1973 it would have been shocking to walk into a business office and not see Selectric IIs or similar. It would be as unusual as using a rotary phone today.
And Selectrics produced documents in a variety of type fonts, including Greek letters and all manner of esoteric scientific/mathematical symbols. You really could type open and close quotation parks and curly apostrophes. Superscript type was easily created by shifting. Even a reduced superscript "th" was technically possible, in spite of what the wingnuts are saying now.
It's true that some whizbangs took a couple of extra steps. People ask, Why would Killian have gone to the trouble of creating a reduced superscript "th"? But we're talking about the early 1970s here. Let's be frank -- in those dear departed times, real men did not touch typewriters. Trust me on this. It's highly probable Killian scribbled a note and gave it to one of the office "girls" to type up for his signature. The office "girls" hardly ever bothered about putting their initials on such documents, in spite of what the secretarial practice books said. But the "girl" would have typed the document very nicely.
Finally, I understand the wingnuts find it astonishing that the type seen in the Killian documents can be reproduced exactly in word processing documents today. But to anyone with a rudimentary understanding of typography, this is not astonishing at all. Times Roman characters produced on a lintotype machine in 1960 will match Times Roman characters created in Microsoft Word today. If two Times Roman characters were not exactly the same, one of them would not be classic Times Roman type, but something else.
Type faces have been consistent for many generations. We still use some type faces that pre-date machine-made type, in fact; e.g., Garamond, still in use after four centuries.
I've collected a few books published and printed in the 19th century. I promise you it is possible to recreate the pages of those books digitally. You could set pages in Quark that exactly match the fonts, spacing, margins, etc.; save as PDF files; and "age" the files in PhotoShop, and I doubt any expert in the world could tell the difference by looks alone. Probably an analysis of ink and paper would reveal the difference, but that's outside my expertise.
Today at Body and Soul, Jeanne d'Arc wrote about the way Right and Left deal with uncertainty -- "In general, people on the left face uncertainty the way I did in that post -- asking for answers, and weighing evidence (and often giving people with an ax to grind more credit than they deserve). On the right, 'evidence' is just whatever supports what you want to believe."
Yes. And I am not writing this today for the "righties" who will believe whatever nonsense they have to believe to keep their heads from exploding. I'm writing for the "lefties" I've seen all over the Web today who are hanging their heads and ready to admit to forged documents.
Stop it. Just stop it. Could the Killian documents be forgeries? Could Paul Wolfowitz be a space alien? Anything is possible.
But there is no evidence I've seen so far that has persuaded me the documents are forgeries. And I'm the best expert I know.
What this goes to show is that not only do right-wingers lie to others, but they save their juiciest bullshit to tell themselves.
Let's face it, folks: Comparing Kerry and Numbnuts objectively shows there's no contest. Kerry is superior in every way. Intellect, character, you name it -AND EVERY SINGLE BUSH SUPPORTER KNOWS IT! What's really painful for Bush supporters is that Kerry and Bush started with similar backgrounds, both went to Yale, and so on. So the starting point is about as close as you'll ever get in a campaign.
So, since they can't come up with any category where Dubya can measure up, they have to make shit up. Kerry fought bravely in Vietnam while Dubya was a male cheerleader? Find some
Freikorps types to claim Kerry didn't fight in Vietnam and didn't bleed enough. Do all Pentagon documents and eyewitness statements back Kerry? Kerry wrote all the reports himself.
Do Penatgon documents prove beyond any and all reasonable doubts that Bush is a liar, a coward and a deserter? They were forged. The only area where Bush exceeds Kerry is in lying and defamation.
Not only are Bush supporters piling one lie on top of another, they are making up more and more preposterous ones.
