A FONT OF FAKES
By IAN BISHOP
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September 14, 2004 -- WASHINGTON � A prominent expert in Microsoft typography yesterday said he has concluded that the CBS News documents about President Bush's National Guard service are forgeries.
"The people who are the real experts, like myself, just laugh," Joseph Newcomer, co-author of a book on Microsoft technology, told The Post yesterday. "In my mind, there is no doubt this is a forgery . . . It is a hoax."
CBS has been in the cross hairs since using the unflattering documents � purported to have been typed by Bush's Vietnam-era squadron commander � which allege Bush failed to fulfill his Guard requirements and intimate he disobeyed an order.
Newcomer, a former adjunct computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, is convinced the documents are a recent fabrication.
Newcomer � who said he's no fan of Bush � tested the pixels and format of the CBS documents.
"With a couple of false starts, I was able in five minutes and two printings to hold my memo in front of the CBS memo, and they were almost identical," he said.
Newcomer's analysis concluded that the chances the documents were written in 1972 are "so vanishingly small as to be indistinguishable from zero."
Specifically, Newcomer says that one of the documents used a letter-font size of 11.5 points � a size that wasn't available on typewriters in the early 1970s. A font is a collection of letters of the same style, face or size.
Newcomer also found that certain adjacent letters tuck into each other in a way that is found in word-processing programs, but not on old typewriters.
He believes a space between the last "1" in 111 and the "th" after numbers reveals that a forger tried unsuccessfully to insert a space to prevent automatic superscripting, a function of word-processing programs.
While typing a superscripted "th" was possible with an IBM typewriter, it would have been difficult, Newcomer said.
Type expert Allan Haley of Agfa Monotype in Massachusetts, which owns the Times New Roman typeface, agreed that it would have been "highly problematic" to switch out the type balls in an IBM typewriter to perform the documents' superscript.
Last night, CBS anchor Dan Rather again defended the documents.
Software designer Richard Katz told CBS the lower-case letter l was used for the numeral 1 in one note, something that would have been automatically corrected by a computer.
Meanwhile, First Lady Laura Bush jumped into the controversy, telling an Iowa radio station yesterday the papers "probably are forgeries, and I think that's terrible, really," The Washington Post reported.
Additional reporting by Deborah Orin
nypost.com |
