Jim writes:
The Selectric computer museum shows in pictures part of what I said in words yesterday. People forget what even proportional spacing looked like ca. 1972.
This Selectric typewriter museum has put up examples of both IBM Selectric and IBM Executive typing, the latter with proportional spacing. Retyping one line from the forged memos, they quite dramatically show the differences between modern computer fonts and even proportional spacing in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Although the examples don’t show the Times New Roman font, they do illustrate that, even with proportional spacing, these typewriters looked NOTHING like MS Word. In particular, proportional spacing then had discrete, non-overlapping characters, not the "pseudo-kerning" present in the forgeries and MS Word. In the lines typed at the museum, note particularly the "fr" in "from," where (unlike modern versions of MS Word) the "r" is not tucked under the "f." Also, note the point I made yesterday that proportional spacing then left a full two spaces between sentences, unlike Times New Roman in MS Word and the forgeries.
This illustrates that Mr. Glennon, the former IBM typewriter repairman now relied on by CBS, is not remembering things accurately (assuming that he is trying to be truthful). Not all versions of "proportional spacing" are created equal, the version available in 1972 was so crude that no one who sees it could mistake it for the MS Word version apparently used in the forgeries.
As Adobe font expert Mr. Phinney reported yesterday in the Washington Post, none of the possible 1972 era office machines (including presumably the IBM Selectric, Executive, and Composer), which he fairly extensively tested, could have produced the CBS forgeries, in part because of the different character widths that are shown in the Selectric museum’s examples and their lack of "pseudo-kerning."
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