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TEXAS ANG typewriters "can't produce the dubious documents":

CBS and Rather are standing by the story, saying it's possible the documents were pounded out on a typewriter. But it proved to be Mission Impossible to back up the CBS claims. "There is no doubt this is a forgery," Pittsburgh typeface expert John Newcomer told The Post.

First, The Post tested the IBM Selectric II, which Killian's secretary, Marian Carr Knox, told CBS arrived at the base in the early '70s, when the suspect documents were purportedly produced. The IBM Selectric II was introduced in 1971. In trying to replicate the May 4, 1972, letter, we had a nightmare of a time in just centering the heading — as was done in the CBS document. Without an automatic-centering feature, we relied on the tab key and space bar to line it up.

We were forced to use Prestige font. This is the closest font available on the Selectric II to the Times New Roman used in the CBS documents, according to certified document expert Bill Flynn. And no matter how much we tinkered with spacing, we couldn't fit as many words on a line as CBS's document. That's because the Selectric II gives each letter the same amount of space, whether it's a tiny lowercase "i" or the wider capitalized "W."

Also, in addition to centering, spacing and font differences from the CBS documents, the superscripted "th" in the typing of Bush's "111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron" couldn't be matched. There is no raised "th" key on the standard Selectric II. The pseudo-superscripting we performed required us to type the 111, then roll the page up manually a half-line, then type the "t" and then the "h."

The whole process took us more than two hours — an awfully long time for a half-page memo. And the results never looked anything close to the CBS documents.

ALSO this from the WaPo:

Tests run by Thomas Phinney, fonts program manager for Adobe Systems, show that none of the possible font widths available on any typewriter or any IBM device from 1972 are able to produce an exact replica of the CBS documents. "Can they do something 'similar'? Sure," Phinney said. "Could they produce those exact memos? Impossible."

Of course, the blogosphere had this story 9 days ago. Posted by Greg Ransom | TrackBack