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Monday, September 13, 2004

Mahablog Explains It All For You
Posted by Jill | 9:11 AM
Mahablog explains why the certainty in wingnut circles that the CBS Killian documents are forgeries is based on complete ignorance of typography, showing that their "experts" are "experts" only in Rovian bullshit:


if you need to measure type (body size, ledding, 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 the PDF 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.

Now, let's shift focus onto the capabilities of common electric typewriters, circa 1972. As I've already explained, the IBM Selectric was very common. By 1972 the offices of America had replaced old manual uprights for electric typewriters, and the Selectric II, introduced in 1971, was the best.

By the time I graduated college in 1973 it would have been shocking to walk into a business office and not see Selectric IIs or similar. It would be as unusual as using a rotary phone today.

And Selectrics produced documents in a variety of type fonts, including Greek letters and all manner of esoteric scientific/mathematical symbols. You really could type open and close quotation parks and curly apostrophes. Superscript type was easily created by shifting. Even a reduced superscript "th" was technically possible, in spite of what the wingnuts are saying now.

It's true that some whizbangs took a couple of extra steps. People ask, Why would Killian have gone to the trouble of creating a reduced superscript "th"? But we're talking about the early 1970s here. Let's be frank -- in those dear departed times, real men did not touch typewriters. Trust me on this. It's highly probable Killian scribbled a note and gave it to one of the office "girls" to type up for his signature. The office "girls" hardly ever bothered about putting their initials on such documents, in spite of what the secretarial practice books said. But the "girl" would have typed the document very nicely.


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