Barbara O’Brien, a Bush-hating moonbat (just look around her site), is feebly attempting to refute the exact 1:1 correspondence between Microsoft Word documents created with default settings in 2004, and supposedly typed memos from a Texas Air National Guard base in 1972 and 1973: The Mahablog. (I’m responding to her because she’s being cited as an expert by several clueless lefty bloggers.)

Just in case you’re wondering who this is, she writes, “I’m the best expert I know.” A list of her credentials precedes her critique.

Here is my list. It does not include journalism school.

Let’s deal immediately with her main criticism, which seems to be that these documents do not show proportional type:

I’m bouncing around the web seeing wingnuts flying off about proportional letter spacing and kerning and whatnot, and I’m telling you these people are off the wall.

Why? Because, if you need to measure type (body size, ledding [sic], letter spacing) and match it exactly, you have to work with original documents. If you are measuring a photocopy of an original document, the measurements can be off by half a point or more. If you are measuring a photocopy of a photocopy, the distortion grows to more than a point. If you are measuring a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy scanned into a PDF file, e.g. the Killian documents, forget it. The “kerning” and letter spacing you think you see may or may not exist on the original document. Probably not, in fact.

I know this because I learned it from my old film patching days. If all I had to work with was a photocopy, my patch wouldn’t match. I had to measure the original printed page.

So, let’s dispense with the “proportional type” theory. I’ve looked at thePDF files, and IMO the quality thereof is too far removed from the original (the wavy baselines are a dead giveaway) to know what the original type proportion was. And any “kerning” one might see is probably the result of distortion that occurs in photocopies that are generations removed from an original.

OK. Now that we have “dispensed” with the proportional type theory, the question remains: how likely is it that multiple photocopies of a monospaced document would deform it in such a way that it precisely matches the line spacing, character spacing, line breaks and tab stops in a document created with Microsoft Word?

In reality, Ms O’Brien is making my case for me. It isn’t just one document that matches this way; similar tests on the other CBS Killian documents also show exact 1:1 correspondences in many critical areas, such as the height of midlines, length of descenders, shape of serifs, superscript, centered paragraphs … the list goes on and on.

The probability of not one, but several 70s-era typewritten memos being mutated by multiple copying into perfect, proportionally spaced wonders that look as if they came from a typesetter is … well, I leave that as an intellectual exercise for our gentle readers. (Hint: start at about zero.)

O’Brien writes more about the typewriters available in the 1970s, speculating that one of the IBM Selectric models could have done this. (I know, it sounds crazy; but remember, she denies that there is any proportional type in the documents.)

Then, after claiming the memos could have come from an IBM Selectric, O’Brien reverses direction and seems to acknowledge that they show a proportional Times New Roman font that could have been produced by a typesetter:

Finally, I understand the wingnuts find it astonishing that the type seen in the Killian documents can be reproduced exactly in word processing documents today. But to anyone with a rudimentary understanding of typography, this is not astonishing at all. Times Romancharacters produced on a lintotype machine in 1960will matchTimes Roman characters created in Microsoft Word today. Iftwo Times Roman characterswere not exactly the same, one of them would not be classicTimes Roman type, but something else.

Typefaces have been consistent for many generations. We still use some type faces that pre-date machine-made type, in fact; e.g., Garamond, still in use after four centuries.

I’ve collected a few books published and printed in the 19th century. I promise you it is possible to recreate the pages of those books digitally. You could setpages in Quark that exactly match the fonts, spacing, margins,etc.; saveas PDF files; and “age” the files in PhotoShop, and I doubt any expert in the world could tell the difference by looks alone. Probably an analysis of ink and paper would reveal the difference, but that’s outside my expertise.

Having trouble discerning her point here? Don’t worry, it isn’t just you. Is she saying the documents were typeset? Arguing that a modern word processor could create a close match to a typeset document from the 19^th century is completely beside the point. Wasn’t she just saying the documents were typed on a Selectric?

Can anyone figure out what the hell this woman is on about?

In another entry at her blog, typography expert O’Brien has some amusing comments about me (and notice, no link) …

The hyenas on the right are still mindlessly yapping about forgeries, because that’s what they do. Butby now most people with brains understandthe documents are most likely authentic.

According to this LA Times article, the “forgery” claim can be traced to an anonymous poster on Free Republic. Of course. Then some junior technoweenie on Little Green Footballs discovered he could replicate the documents on Microsoft Word, which said junior technoweenie, who clearly knows absolutely nothing about typography, assumed was proof the documents were phony.

… and then some equally amusing comments about President Bush:

There are two legitimate issues here. One is the content of the documents, which proves Our Fearless Leaders [sic] was indeed a spoiled little princeling who got away with disobeying a direct order while dissing his country.

But the other question is, how can we restore some semblance of responsibility to news reporting?

Now do you see why we call them moonbats?

UPDATE at 9/13/04 1:16:36 pm:

Barbara O’Brien responds—by shutting off comments and whining about being “vilified.” Waaahhh!

Not a word of actual response to my points, of course. And also notice how she won’t even link to LGF, as if she’s afraid that some kind of Internet Cootie Backwash will get on her if she does.

UPDATE at 9/13/04 2:01:59 pm:

Even though O’Brien has removed her comments links to avoid criticism, you can still post comments in her topic right here. Please be polite. (Hat tip: Doug.)

UPDATE at 9/13/04 2:16:54 pm:

Oh well, fun’s over. She managed to disappear the whole comment thread. Way to deal with facts, typography expert O’Brien!

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