LGF reader Terrell Gibbs emailed another terrific example, demonstrating again the indisputable uniqueness of the “font fingerprint” of the modern versions of Microsoft Word and the Times New Roman font. Here is Terrell’s description of his experiment, followed by the overlaid examples:

One thing that I’ve noticed in the debate is that many people seem to take it on faith that all versions of Times New Roman are going to have identical spacing. As Mr. Newcomer has so clearly explained, anybody who knows anything about the evolution of computer typography knows that this cannot be true.

However, it occurred to me that it would be amusing to see how much the font has changed just over the short term. On my Macintosh, I have Apple’s System 9.22 installed, with Times New Roman v. 2.60 (creation date 2000). I also have Apple’s OS X 10.3.5 installed, with Times New Roman v. 3.05. So I opened Microsoft Word 5.1 under OS 9, and typed in the text of the “CYA” memo. I manually superscripted the “th” and reduced the point size from 12 to 10, since Word 5 does not do this automatically. Then I printed the file to a HP 4000 laser printer, and opened the same file in Microsoft Word 2004 under OS X and printed it again. I scanned both printouts on the same scanner and overlaid them in Photoshop. You’ll observe that there are small but distinct differences in relative line length (on one line amounting to a full character difference), and even greater differences in vertical spacing.

So the very same document file, printed from different versions of Word, with versions of Times New Roman only 4 years apart, does not match as well as the overlay that you have published of Word vs. the CYA memo.

terrell gibbs

UPDATE at 9/17/04 5:59:30 pm:

Also see this post from Raistlan, about similar experiments done with many different versions of Microsoft Word.