smokerblog

The Plot Thickens

Ugh. I knew I shouldn't have gotten involved in this. Nathan has posted some comments making a couple of good points re: how closely a basic Microsoft Word rendering of the TANG memo matches the original.

Except I stand by what I say, Fygar's comments notwithstanding, a font is a font. I didn't say fonts were identical across all applications, but they are very close. I've been in the printing industry for over ten years and I know the nightmare of having conflicting versions of a font or improper leading reflow text off the bottom of the page minutes beffore a job is supposed to hit the press. But that is supposed to be the exception, not the norm.

UPDATE (9/13/04):
Now, Nathan is right, once the margins are correctly adjusted, the leading (the space between lines) in Word is suspiciously close to the TANG memo. But I'm still not entirely convinced, especially when you take a look at the letterforms up close. JuliusBlog makes this case better than I can (or care to).

So again, what does this prove? Nothing. Except maybe another theory to throw on the growing inferno. Perhaps the memo was forged, but in a more basic text editor with more primitive linespacing than Word, and then distorted in the vertical dimension through repeated photocopying. Or maybe that "basic text editor" was an IBM Selectric typewriter set to doublespace instead of single space.

Blech. I am now about 75% convinced that the documents were forged. JuliusBlog's analysis was done from a screen grab, not from an actual printed output from MS Word. Looking at one of my examples, they are close enough that the distorted letterforms could have been a result of repeated photocopying. What I say below still holds.
END UPDATE

So that's all I plan to contribute to this. As I said last night, I don't really care whether the documents were forged or not. If they were forged, it gives Dan Rather a black eye. Big whup. I don't watch Dan Rather anyway. If they weren't forged then it shows that GWB didn't fulfill his duties to the TANG 30+ years ago. Again, big whup. I'd rather judge the candidates on what they are doing now, not what what they did in their twenties.