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Friday, September 10, 2004

Blogs v's 60 Minutes

Blogs v. 60 Minutes

Tech Central Station -
"… 60 Minutes has obtained a number of documents we are told were taken from Col. Killian's personal file. Among them, a never-before-seen memorandum from May 1972, where Killian writes that Lt. Bush called him to talk about 'how he can get out of coming to drill from now through November.'"

however

Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs noticed that said documents were kerned, meaning that they had been typed on a modern word processor. Touche.

4 Comments:

Blogger Miguel said...

Proportional Times Roman fonts were available on IBM golfball typewriters at the time of the memo. More info here.

Obviously, this doesn't prove anything either way, but it's certainly worth mentioning.

2:32 PM  
Blogger McFox said...

Thanks for that link, Michael. Makes for a different perspective.

12:38 PM  
Blogger Bavi_H said...

Kerning does not mean "proportial fonts." Kerning means adjusting the space in between letters to make particular combinations of letters look better.

For example take the combination "Wo". Because of the diagonal angle of the W, there can be a distracting amount of whitespace between the W and the o, making it look like the letter spacing is slightly off. With kerning, the word processor will slightly shrink the space between the W and the o so the spacing between the letters flows more smoothly.

I've only recently heard of this. But, come on, there's very little probablity that any system avaliable from 1973 would produce something so pixel-for-pixel identical to today's Microsoft Word. It is obviously a fake.

11:37 AM  
Blogger McFox said...

Kerning does indeed involve the spacing between letters. It usually noticed when pointed out. Something which seems to have eluded the source of the documents.

My own view is the documents are indeed fake, and there seems to be a general agreement forming that this is the case. Certainly, CBS and Dan Rather have lost credibility.

9:26 PM  

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