Auto Centering in 1973
Charles Johnson
Fri Sep 10, 2004 at 10:58 am PDT • Views: 939
Chronically Biased has even more damning evidence of forgery; Phil Magness noticed an address in one of the CBS News documents that was auto-centered: CBS’ “new” Bush guard memos a hoax?
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.
[image available at Chronically Biased]
As you can see the test worked and, in doing so, inadvertently 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.
Special thanks to Phil for mentioning that my experiment with Microsoft Word used the time-honored document authentication technique of “pantograph replication.” (Who knew?)
Frank says: