September 12, 2004

WHAT'S THE FREQUENCY, KERNETH?

Here’s a fine study of kerning as it applies to the Rather/CBS documents.

Posted by Tim Blair at September 12, 2004 09:00 PM
Comments

I love kerning.
Can I have the T-Shirt rights?

Posted by: aussiecom at September 12, 2004 at 09:37 PM

Blogs have kerned and superscripted Dan Rather a new asshole. Next revelation, who at the DNC and/or Kerry campaign supplied the memos?

Posted by: perfectsense at September 12, 2004 at 10:36 PM

I apologize for double-posting here, but this took me awhile to create, and I was afraid it would be buried.

CBS is apparently going to try to brazen this scandal out. I don't want for them to get away with it.

Rather than discussing the esoterics of kerning, let people print and examine their own forgeries that are virtually identical with the CBS memoranda.

You just need Microsoft Word '97 or later, the standard Times New Roman typeface, and a bit of persistence. I did not test this with all versions of Word, so the commands may vary from those below.

First, open a new blank document in Word. In the top menu click File > Page Setup, then set the top margin at 0.7", the bottom at 1", the left at 1.35", and the right at 1.25". Now click Format > Font, and select Times New Roman, regular, 11 point.

Your "original" 1972 letter from Lt. Colonel Killian is printed below. It has underlining instead of spaces to preserve the letter’s white space in HTML and Word.

Put the cursor at the beginning of the underlining, hold down Shift and Ctrl, and tap the End key or use the down arrow key to select all the text in the letter. Release all keys, right click in the selected area, and copy. Left click at the start of your Word document. Click Edit in the top menu, then Paste Special, select “unformatted text”, and “OK” to paste.

Now we replace the underlining with spaces. Left click at the beginning of the document, click Edit, Replace. Type one underline mark after “Find” and one space after “Replace”. Hit OK. If asked if you want to start again at the beginning of the document, click OK. All the underlining should now be spaces.

Just to make absolutely sure that all the text is now in 11 point Times Roman, put the cursor at the start of the document, and select the entire letter. Change it all to another font size, say 12 point, then back to 11.

Almost done. Locate the "th" following "111th" near the end of the letter. Delete the "th", type "th" again followed by a space, and delete the space. This should put the "th" into superscript.

Last, add one carriage return (hit Enter) in the space where the signature would go.

Now save the file. Print it, on a LaserJet if possible. Scuff it up a bit to "age" it, and copy it on a copier set to darken a bit. Copy the copy.

If you followed the instructions exactly, and all went well, you have just created an almost exact replica of the "authentic" typewritten document that CBS used to discredit George Bush. Even the superscript "th" in "111th" is at precisely the right elevation.

Compare your document to the "original" CBS May 4th memorandum at

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/09/06/politics/main641481.shtml

The May 4th file is linked on the left in a grey box that says "More Information". Double-click to open the PDF file in Acrobat, then print it.

You should also save the CBS file, in case you ever want to remember this shining example of the liberal media’s "journalistic integrity."

Here is the letter:
____________________________________________________111th_Fighter_Interceptor_Squadron
___________________________________________________________________P.O._Box_34567
______________________________________________________________Houston,_Texas_77034


________________________________________________________________________________________________04_May_1972


MEMORANDUM_FOR__1st_Lt._George_W._Bush,_5000_Longmont_#8,_Houston,
____________Texas_77027


SUBJECT:_____Annual_Physical_Examination_(Flight)

1._You_are_ordered_to_report_to_commander,_111_F.I.S.,_Ellington_AFB,_not_later_than_(NLT)_14_May,1972,_to_conduct_annual_physical_examination_(flight)IAW_AFM_35-13.

2._Report_to_111th_F.I.S._administrative_officer_for_schedule_of_appointment_and_additional_instructions._Examination_will_be_conducted_in_duty_status.


_______________________________________________________________________________________________JERRY_B._KILLIAN
_______________________________________________________________________________________________Lt._Colonel
_______________________________________________________________________________________________Commander

Posted by: TomC at September 12, 2004 at 11:00 PM

Tim: the post was moved so I went ahead and changed the link as the original was getting server-crushed & there was a request to link to the new site.

Posted by: Andrea Harris at September 13, 2004 at 01:08 AM

My questions are:
Why wasn't this memo on official USAF/TANG stationery?
Considering this was not a friendly reminder to do something.
And a post office box?
I would have thought the address would have been "111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron, Texas Air National Guard, Ellington AFB, Texas" or something similar.

Posted by: bc at September 13, 2004 at 01:31 AM

I still can't get over CBS expecting us to believe an officer would really write 'CYA' in a memo.

This is all sounding a lot like the Daily Mirror and its faked pictures of an Iraqi POW being abused. That editor tried to tough it out too... until he was sacked.

Posted by: Wilbur at September 13, 2004 at 01:39 AM

bc, not every Guard unit had official stationery custom printed way back then. That depended on their budget.....and internal memos would have been type on blank stock. The stationery would be saved for formal letters and such.

As for the address....the letterhead has to contain the mailing address. That's standard for most federal agencies and the military. Some don't need elaboration (e.g., "The White House"), but most do need to be that specific.

Posted by: The Real JeffS at September 13, 2004 at 03:04 AM

Internal memos on blank stock? I don't know about life among the wing-wipers, but in the army (and Guard in NY and CA, when I was running out my reserve time), we had a stationery piece called a DA Form 98, if memory serves, which we used for memoranda and the like. Does the AF/ANG not have an equivalent? Hard to imagine any military service not sticking a standardized format and ID number on anything that sat still long enough...

Posted by: richard mcenroe at September 13, 2004 at 03:42 AM

Richard, do you mean the "Disposition Form" or "DF"? We used that as well as blank stock. That includes when I was on active duty as well as in the Guard.

The DF became obsolete with computers, since you could template up a form letter easily, starting with MS Word v2.0 (as I recall), in the early 1990's.

Posted by: The Real JeffS at September 13, 2004 at 05:13 AM

There is a very good possibility that the forger is someone named Marty Heldt, who sold Bush National Guard documents (the same ones?) to political consultant Brooks Gregory:

When all of this crap began back in 1999, I was a political consultant for several Democratic candidates, as well as later being a senior consultant for Janet Reno in her run for Governor. I bought the document package from Marty Heldt and we subjected them to the most thorough investigation one could imagine. Why? Because if there was anything there, we damn sure wanted to use it. But guess what? Only two of those documents proved to be authentic and they were not even related to the charge being levelled. Many of them are so blatant in their alterations it is almost funny. Several purport to be signed by real live military personnel, yet they don't even know the proper format for a military date.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Posted by: Spiny Norman at September 13, 2004 at 08:43 AM

It's not Kerning people - it's 'pseudo-kerning!" - now you know ;)

Posted by: Gnu at September 13, 2004 at 08:50 AM

We also have another likely suspect: Bill Burkett.

Posted by: Spiny Norman at September 13, 2004 at 09:07 AM

Wow, I’m getting tired of this. The word “kerning” has introduced more confusion than it’s worth. People talking about a “y”’s tail tucked under a preceding letter, or a “T” literally overhanging a following character, when those things never happen under default settings in Word. Never. There are OTHER case of overhang & undertuck—even touchings & interprenetratings. One should sit down, go into Word, & look at every combination of two letters in 72pt & 500% magnification. As for what printers will do, can be an issue there but, in the present case, I doubt it.

Yes, it’s pseudo-kerning, resulting from very precise proportional spacing & good font design. Under default settings, there is no character-pairing-sensitive automatic proportional spacing. Formatting the text with Word’s “Kerning for Fonts” brings a limited degree of pairing-sensitivity, especially involving overhanging capitals like “T” & “W” followed by small snug letters like “o”. In the absence of such cases it makes no difference at all. Formatting the text of the memos with Word’s “Kerning for Fonts” feature changes the character spacing of many lines & brings the Word replication out of alignment with the memo. Generally you will see these differences both on screen & in the print-out. As for what some printers do (though not the HP in my experience), whatever printer printed the original memos, it did not add significant kerning unasked. It didn’t act as though the memos had originally been formatted with Word’s “Kerning for Fonts” feature.

The Word Times New Roman replications match the memos exactly in terms of character spacing. That really is the most striking thing of all. The manual typist in two of the memos chose the same line breaks as Word in default settings, & in a third memo the same linebreaks as with default margins & an 11pt font. (On my computer I have to expand a margin very slightly for the remaining one of the memos & put it in 11pt. Maybe some other combo of fontsize & margins would work better).

Overall, viewed at high magnification, there are fewer interpretively clearcut cases in the memos than in the Word replication of character overlap, overhang, etc. I suspect that the memos’ font may be not actually Times New Roman but a font with the same character-spacing properties as Times New Roman. By “interpretively clearcut” I mean for those who have experience trying to identify characters on a bad fax. You’d be surprised how those little forms can change. The memos in sufficient magnification present an immediate visual appearance of many overlaps that simply do not occur with Word, & of the absences of overhangs which DO occur in Word. Look under high magnification at the “fe” in “feedback” in the “CYA” memo. Either it’s just fax/pho’py fuzziness, or it’s a font which is not Times New Roman but has many of TNR’s properties including character-spacing properties.

Clearcut: the “j” tucking its tail beneath the previous space in “my job” in the “CYA” memo. You see it in the original, & you see it in Word. Would any electric typewriter of the early 1970s or earlier have done this? Word in default settings will tuck the “j”’s tail under almost any preceding character. The “j”’s tail actually touches the tail of a preceding “q”.

In Word in sufficient magnification you will find no case of a “y” ’s tail tucked under a preceding character. You will find many characters which “f” will overhang. “f” bumps into a succeeding “b”, “h”, or “k”. That’s not pairing sensitivity, that’s a design compromise. That’s why I’m struck by the appearance of a kind of reluctance by the memos’ “f”s to look as protuberant over a succeeding character as the “f”s do in Word. Maybe another font with the same character-spacing properties.

Somebody who did an animated graphic http://img41.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img41&=60minbusted.swf th matched one of the memos by doing it in Word 2002 with the font Palatino Linotype. I downloaded & installed a Palatino Linotype font from some Website but the resultant character spacings were out of alignment with the memo. Maybe that person has a different version of the font.

This will help show that proportional spacing can look kerned without variations in spacing dependent on particular character pairings. The automatic proportional spacing is not pairing-sensitive. The first line is typed from memory from the "CYA" memo (I don't recall offhand whether there are one or two spaces after the “1.”). The second line is a scrambling & alphabetization of the characters typed in the first line. The third line is one I produced by messing around just now. In using click-&-drag to scramble, it’s beter to use something like Wordpad than Word which tends to remove or add spaces.

To see the fact that, in terms of the program’s spacing, the three lines are exactly the same length, highlight all three simultaneously, & highlight at least some of the fourth line further below, to be sure that you’ve highlighted the third line to the very end (in Word it’s easy to err on that sort of thing). This works here in Internet Explorer & Mozilla as well as in the Word program itself.

You can re-scramble the letters to conduct further tests. Again, do that in Wordpad, not Word.

1. Staudt has obviously pressured Hodges more about Bush. I’m having trouble running
1.. a a a a B b b b d d d eeeeegggHhhhIiiillmmnnnnooooooprrrrrSssssssttttuuuuuuuvvy’
eningaudt ads obvhiviny pbSIHBted oges ms1h surore abomut us. n’. haouslg troule rur
(Highlight at least some of this line too).

If the proportional spacing were character-pairing-sensitive, one would expect to find that some orders of the same characters came out longer than others.

Posted by: ForNow at September 13, 2004 at 11:18 AM

My test just above doesn’t work on the screen if you’re viewing in a browser view-text size that’s larger than normal. Either reduce the text viewing size (probably by clicking up on “View” & finding the option) or copy into Word.

Posted by: ForNow at September 13, 2004 at 11:25 AM

Back in the days of manual typewriters, the usual pitch was 10 characters to the inch - known as 'pica'.

This was carried on when electric typewriters - including those with golf-balls or daisy-wheels - came along.

I seem to recall that 10 characters to the inch is the same as 12 point, so if the Killian letters are 11 point, then there is something fishy.

Posted by: peggy sue at September 13, 2004 at 12:05 PM

i heard the thing about what you said about the vietnamese guy and your car on your post that you posted in Feburary 2004. Are you racist? Please email me back, and tell me if you are or not. Because quite frankly, as a person who is Vietnamese, and speaks fluently in english, and earns more than a $100,000 a year, I fucking hate racist people! If you are racist, I think everybody who will visit this site, will now know of this serious problem, and please email back, stating your answer if you are racist or not, and I have no idea!

Posted by: m at September 13, 2004 at 12:44 PM

i heard the thing about what you said about the vietnamese guy and your car on your post that you posted in Feburary 2004. Are you racist? Please email me back, and tell me if you are or not. Because quite frankly, as a person who is Vietnamese, and speaks fluently in english, and earns more than a $100,000 a year, I hate racist people! If you are racist, I think everybody who will visit this site, will now know of this serious problem, and please email back, stating your answer if you are racist or not, and I have no idea!

Posted by: m at September 13, 2004 at 12:44 PM

By “11pt” I meant only the font size, nothing to do with number of characters per inch. The spacing is tailored in proportion to individual character size & does not depend on a rule of number of characters per inch.

Posted by: ForNow at September 13, 2004 at 12:53 PM

I'm not racist. You’re thinking of Niall Cook.

Posted by: tim at September 13, 2004 at 12:53 PM

Please read.

http://www.flounder.com/bush.htm

Posted by: a at September 13, 2004 at 12:54 PM

"Because quite frankly, as a person who is Vietnamese, and speaks fluently in english, and earns more than a $100,000 a year"

manthatsalotta MONEY!!

Posted by: Glenn Bowen at September 13, 2004 at 01:21 PM

At that URL is at the Webpage of http://www.flounder.com/bush.htm is Joseph M. Newcomer, PH.D., a pioneer in electric typesetting & no fan of Bush. He totally denounces the memos as frauds, obvious, incompetent, crappy frauds. They disgust him in terms of ethics & competence alike. He says that, to avoid a libel lawsuit, he cannot state publicly his opinion of whoever it may have been that CBS News got to “authenticate” those memos.

Dan Rather has a fuck of a lot of explaining to do.

Posted by: ForNow at September 13, 2004 at 02:27 PM

ForNow,

Wow! TomC, too. Your typography discussion is almost beautiful in how you use exacting detail and logic to elicit some answers.

Posted by: charlotte at September 13, 2004 at 02:27 PM

Well, ForNow

You went and got less lyrical right before I posted-- I was referring to your posts before. Guess righteous anger can be almost beautiful, too!

Posted by: charlotte at September 13, 2004 at 02:32 PM

Dan Rather has a fuck of a lot of explaining to do.

A simple "good bye" will be fine.

Posted by: David [.net] at September 13, 2004 at 03:29 PM

Thank you, Charlotte. Considering how often people have told me that they admire & respect me when I curse, it’s surprising I don’t curse more often.

Matter of fact, it’s fuckin’ surprising.

Truth is, I was hoping to get Tim to quote me on the homepage. He did that the last time I cursed italicly. Something to do with Sandy Berger’s socks.

Posted by: ForNow at September 13, 2004 at 04:25 PM

I said:

(On my computer I have to expand a margin very slightly for the remaining one of the memos & put it in 11pt. Maybe some other combo of fontsize & margins would work better)

I meant NARROW a margin a bit (expand the typable area). At least -0.03" & at most -0.14". Sorry

Posted by: ForNow at September 13, 2004 at 07:05 PM

Truth is, I was hoping to get Tim to quote me on the homepage. He did that the last time I cursed italicly. Something to do with Sandy Berger’s socks.

Oh, thank God. I thought I was the only one who tried to do that. *sweatdrop*

Posted by: Sortelli at September 13, 2004 at 11:43 PM

Yep, the homepage quote is a thrill.

God, I'm sad.

Posted by: Dave S. at September 14, 2004 at 03:12 AM

I think that the font in the memos may be Times instead of Times New Roman. The lower serif on the upper-case S is slants leftward-upward rather than vertical, & that’s seems like the memos. The f doesn’t quite overhang the following character & that seems more consistent with the memos. (Remember to look at all the instances of f in the memos, in order to try to separate fax/pho’py fuzziness from what the original printed memo would look like.)

Of course maybe the darned things were done on a Mac. Somebody working on a Mac preferred a Mac font Times OE to Times New Roman for the memos. I don’t have a Mac.

Posted by: ForNow at September 14, 2004 at 03:36 AM

There is a very good possibility that the forger is someone named Marty Heldt, who sold Bush National Guard documents (the same ones?) to political consultant Brooks Gregory:


When all of this crap began back in 1999, I was a political consultant for several Democratic candidates, as well as later being a senior consultant for Janet Reno in her run for Governor. I bought the document package from Marty Heldt and we subjected them to the most thorough investigation one could imagine. Why? Because if there was anything there, we damn sure wanted to use it. But guess what? Only two of those documents proved to be authentic and they were not even related to the charge being levelled. Many of them are so blatant in their alterations it is almost funny. Several purport to be signed by real live military personnel, yet they don't even know the proper format for a military date.

Posted by: Spiny Norman at September 13, 2004:Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

1.) Brooks Gregory doesn’t exist. He didn't buy documents from me and he didn't work for Janet Reno. Brooks Gregory doesn't exist.


2.) I received my documents via the FOIA in the summer of 2000. I posted them to my website shortly after receiving them. They are still there, freely available to all, displaying the same lousy scanning job.

One need only look at the documents released by the White House last February (available here: USA Today ) to discern the fraudulent nature of the "Gregory" claims. These are documents that can easily be seen at USA Today as identical to the ones I have posted for the last four+ years.

There were very few documents I received in 2000 that were not released by the White House in February. Likewise, there were only a few that I had which were not released by the White House in February.

From this mornings news reports I understand that yesterday's release included the orders for May and June -- which I received in 2000 but were not included in the February release. I also note that the PR release which mentioned "gets high from flying" was included in last nights release. This, again, was a document I received in 2000 but which was not released by the White House in February.

These last releases provide complete validation for all of the documents I received.

Posted by: Martin Heldt at September 19, 2004 at 02:23 PM