What do you make of these comments?
tia,
uw
During my illustrious military career, when not on secret missions up the Hudson, I was assigned to the newspaper at Ft. Lewis, Washington, where there were a number of IBM Executive typewriters but no models that could do proportional type. There was no such typewriter on the entire post.
When assigned to the publications section of the Admissions Office at West Point, I found the one and only such typewriter on the post. It was in our section and closely guarded by the civilian secretary trained and assigned to operate it. It definitely was not used for memos. It had taken a special requisition, signed by the head of the Admissions Office, a full colonel, and the Superintendent of the Academy, a general, to get it. The military's standard purchasing procedures had to be waived in order to obtain one of these machines because these were not something normally purchased by the military and were available from only one manufacturer, IBM. Those typewriters cost over $4,000 in 1971, about the same as a Buick Roadmaster.
You can bet the children that neither Guard nor Reserve units, not to mention the majority of military posts, had such typewriters at any time.
Keep up the good work.
Glenn Avery"
.....................................
"-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----Hash: SHA1
Hi, Hugh.
My name is Paul Snively. I'm a software engineer and former Apple
Computer employee. Specifically, I was employed by Apple Computer from
1989-1991, the years in which Apple invented TrueType font technology,
shipped the first implementation of TrueType in Macintosh System
Software 7.0, and licensed the TrueType technology to Microsoft. My
personal involvement with TrueType, however, was limited to participating in a code review of the TrueType renderer for System 7.0.
Corky Cartwright, whom I've incidentally known of for a minimum of
three years due to his involvement with the Scheme programming language
and specifically the <http://www.plt-scheme.org>, is, of course,
exactly correct in his observations regarding proportional font spacing
and the likelihood of its applicability even via the IBM Composer circa
1973. The animated GIF of the Microsoft Word document overlaying the
CBS-provided PDF is already quite convincing. However, it gets worse
for CBS.
Microsoft uses TrueType font technology under license from Apple
Computer. Apple Computer holds three patents related to TrueType:
<http://www.delphion.com/details?pn=US05155805__>,
<http://www.delphion.com/details?pn=US05159668__>, and
<http://www.delphion.com/details?pn=US05325479__>, as described at
<http://freetype.sourceforge.net/patents.html>. The salient fact is
that _at least one of these patents covers technology that can affect
the font's metrics_, as described at
<http://freetype.sourceforge.net/freetype2/index.html>, which I quote in part here:
"Some small aspects of the TrueType specification being covered by
several patents owned by Apple Computer, it is generally not possible
to render TrueType glyphs exactly as they should without infringing on
Apple's IP rights (without a license).
This explains that we've taken some special measures to deal with this
problem:
First of all, a default build of the FreeType 2 sources will not use
any of the patented techniques to render TrueType glyphs. You'll thus
be safe to use it freely in all kinds of projects.
Unfortunately, this freedom comes at the price of sometimes
less-than-ideal glyph quality, depending on the font design, and most
surely different glyph metrics for a given font."
Thus, the Microsoft Word document/CBS PDF overlay exhibiting completely
accurate character overlay strongly suggests that, at the very least,
the origin of the PDF document was a piece of word-processing software
using an Apple-licensed TrueType implementation, a font technology,
glyph-hinting process, patent, and license that didn't exist until
1989.
Please feel free to quote me on the air and/or on your web site. Please
also note that this e-mail is digitally signed using GNU Privacy Guard,
and my public key can be found on <http://wwwkeys.us.pgp.net> and other
OpenPGP-compatible public keyservers around the Internet, with key ID
31C14015, fingerprint BD49 DB9E B110 9BA6 7B7D 6D19 6E8B 75C3 31C1
4015.
Best regards,
Paul Snively
hughhewitt.com |
