Typography guru Joseph M. Newcomer responds to Columbia Journalism Review’s fallacies, in the latest update to his analysis of the CBS Killian memos.

“On September 11, a self-proclaimed typography expert, Joseph Newcomer, copied the experiment and posted the results on his personal Web site”

True. In my defense, I must say that I am, indeed, a “self-proclaimed typography expert”. The use of this term in the article, however, is to suggest that I do not have the credentials to make such a claim, and in fact the first thought that comes to mind when seeing this phrase is “yellow journalism”. I will match my understanding of computer font technology against just about anyone except actual full-time font designers (I don’t understand the minute details of the subtle hinting mechanisms that are used to make fonts scale properly and still look good, although I, like anyone else who read Don Knuth’s work on typography a quarter-century ago, know that such mechanisms are necessary, and abstractly what they do). I have been working with computer typography for at least 35 years now, have published at least one major paper which describes my work (which I cited, but I’ll cite it again, here: R. Reddy, W. Broadley, L. Erman, R. Johnsson, J. Newcomer, G.Robertson, and J. Wright, XCRIBL — A hardcopy scan line graphics system for document generation, Information Processing Letters 1(6)(1972)246-251), I wrote one of the first programs for doing computer typesetting to what we now know as laser printers (although laser printers were actually the next generation beyond the XGP), and in 1996 wrote a 41-page chapter on Microsoft font technology for our book, Win32 Programming. My program, the Font Explorer, which is freely available on the Internet, was used to collect actual quantitative data on Microsoft fonts which shows my analysis substantiates the hypothesis that the documents are forgeries. I used scientific methodology to prove my points.

“Little Green Footballs delighted in the ”authoritative and definitive validation“, and posted a link to Newcomer’s report on September 12.”

Absolutely true in all counts. LGF was delighted. And I did my best to make the report both authoritative and definitive, so I certainly consider that praise. However, the use of quote marks suggests that Pein thinks it is neither, yet seems unable to provide any evidence of failure in my part to not be authoritative and definitive. Again, the subtle use of “yellow journalism”.

Never forget that Charles Johnson of LGF produced the actual, definitive, conclusive, inarguable example which proved that the memos were forgeries, within hours of their release. Of course he was delighted that there was substantial scientific justification for his conclusion. Any researcher is always pleased when an independent scientist can reproduce his results using a different approach. What is sad here is that Johnson’s obvious simple experiment was denigrated by those who were incapable of logical thought. My mistake was to think that such people could be convinced by additional compelling evidence. This led me into this whole fray.