Paul Boutin

Hey, this is more interesting than the actual campaign. ABC News has a summary of document experts’ reasons to believe the documents from 1973 might actually be from 2004:

• The memos were written using a proportional typeface, where letters take up variable space according to their size, rather than fixed-pitch typeface used on typewriters, where each letter is allotted the same space. Proportional typefaces are available only on computers or on very high-end typewriters that were unlikely to be used by the National Guard.
• The memos include superscript, i.e. the “th” in “187th” appears above the line in a smaller font. Superscript was not available on typewriters.
• The memos included curly apostrophes rather than straight apostrophes found on typewriters.
• The font used in the memos is Times Roman, which was in use for printing but not in typewriters. The Haas Atlas ó the bible of fonts ó does not list Times Roman as an available font for typewriters.
• The vertical spacing used in the memos, measured at 13 points, was not available in typewriters, and only became possible with the advent of computers.

That last one is going to be tough to explain away.

Regardless of what GWB did or didn’t do in 1973, the newly released documents sure do look like they were written on a modern computer rather than an early 70’s typewriter, which would use a fixed-pitch font like Courier rather than the proportional Times New Roman seen in the new memos.

Try it yourself: Type the text of any of the newly released memos into Microsoft Word on its default settings. You get the exact same layout in every way. Or you can just download my own Word version of one of them and compare to the one at the CNN link above. The only difference is the superscript “th,” but that also comes out the exact same as CNN’s copy when I print the document on a Canon i960 rather than look at it onscreen on my Mac or PC. The difference is printer font vs the screen font, I’m pretty sure.

What we really need is an expert on office equipment in the Air National Guard circa 1973. Anyone? [UPDATE: R. Salz writes in and recalls using proportional-spaced fonts on IBM Executive Typewriters in '76. Atrios links to a history page that explains the Executive model used a multiple escapement mechanism (whatever that is) and four different letter widths to do proportional spacing. One of his comments there links to an IBM page that says they've done proportional-font typewriters since 1941. The AP quotes a forensics expert who says the superscript "th" is what indicates a modern word processor. Other forensics sources quoted by the Weekly Standard cite the apostrophes and the unusual (for a typewriter) font. My own skepticism lives on mostly because of the near-exact lineup of the archive and Word docs shown in LGF's link #2 below, despite the premise that the documents were produced by one mechanical and one digital process thirty years apart.]

A tip of the nonpartisan journalistic hat to Cyrus Farivar at Columbia j-school, who got me intrigued by sending me Little Green Footballs’ similar evaluation. Call ‘em Bush-lovin’ wingnuts over there at LGF if you will, but their evidence (Link 1 - Link 2) is pretty solid and easily reproduced.

Just as we were talking about good headlines, this story comes in.

Results of a study in which human readers’ eyeballs were tracked as they looked at news sites and multimedia content. Lots of good graphics and explanations here. A sample finding:

We found that when people look at blurbs under headlines on news homepages, they often only look at the left one-third of the blurb. In other words, most people just look at the first couple of words — and only read on if they are engaged by those words.