1966
Selectric Composer Sample Overlaid with Times New Roman
On page 5 (by pdf numbering) of this 1967 IBM paper, The
IBM Selectric Composer - Philosophy of Composer Design, there
is a genuine print sample from an IBM Selectric Composer.
That animated overlay to the left was made using that
print sample and
a recreation in Times New Roman done with WordPerfect 10 (WordPerfect
handles this sort of right-justified
typesetting much more competently than Word). JASC's "Animation Shop 3"
was used to animate the transition from the original in blue to the
recreation in red. Full justification warps true font comparison, but
the end
result is kind of amusing and served to motivate me enough to go
through the tedious effort of creating the following animated
GIF's of all the memos, including two CBS had
but didn't use for its original report. There is also aother special
animated overlay at the end from a different 1973 document.
The Composer, regardless of its brochure
claiming documents being "so simple to prepare," is a very
unlikely device to have been used for creating things like memos,
but as I mentioned on the main
page, in 1972 IBM came out with the much more mainstream word processor
called the "MC/ET"
("Mag Card/Executive") and that also utilized 9-unit
proportional
spacing like that of the Composer, as well as
automatic centering and other nice stuff that you might expect from a
system 6 years newer than the original Composer the print sample
came from.
Creating the
animations
My process for recreating the memos began with getting the best
copies of them available, which seemed to be on Mary Mapes's site here, as an
addendum to her book, Truth
and Duty. These are all in PDF format so I then would start by
marking &
copying out a memo image for pasting into Irfanview. I used Irfanview for
all of my image processing along with a somewhat less well known but
still wickedly cool program appropriately called Cool Ruler.
Cool Ruler is a virtual ruler that's always in the foreground and easy
to
switch from vertical to horizontal orientation, along with having a few
other very useful tricks. I would use Irfanview to rotate the usually
crooked memo images using Cool Ruler as a guide to level out the lines,
and Cool Ruler also came in very handy later on when resizing
the recreations for best fit with the originals. I used WordPerfect 10
for all of my recreations since, well, Word sucks and I don't use it
unless I really have to. Plus
WordPerfect does this sort of page recreation so much more
gracefully than Word. In case anyone thinks that the results would be
different using Word instead, no. Times New Roman is a system font and
as long as you have the fomatting the way you want it, the output will
be the same (and I did do a check with a Word recreation on one of the
longer memos to be sure.) I printed out my recreations on an old but
trusty HP LaserJet 4L and then scanned them in via an also old and
trusty-enough Visioneer PaperPort OneTouch. When doing the final
resizing and cropping
for best fit, I used line spacing as the primary guide for resizing and
I aligned things from the left side only -- if Word or such was used to
create the memos, there should be an overall fit, no matter the
distortion from any supposed multiple recopying or faxing; however, if
some ancient
system was used, even if it was using some sort of Times typeface,
then there would likely be discrepencies here and there in line lengths
and in the relative
positions of words and individual characters. The very last thing I
used Irfanview for was to color the original memo blue and the
recreation
red, which I did by simply cranking up the desired color via
the "Enhance
Colors" option.. The final stage involved copying the final results
from
Irfanview as frames in JASC's "Animation Shop 3". The blue
original was the start frame and the red recreation the end frame,
with each set to a .9 second frame rate, and with a .5 second dissolve
effect inserted in between. And if I didn't like the final result, I
would just start all over.
Whether all this effort was worth it, well.... You be the judge. February
2, 1972 Memo
The above memo is one of the two that CBS didn't use. This is the memo
that could not have been forged because the info for the "flight
certifications" bit was not available to any would be forger prior to
CBS obtaining the memos. Still, the recreation is nearly exact,
although this would be the expected result for such a short and simple
document using a Times or Roman style font. May
4, 1972 Memo
Hmmm, not so good this time. While the memo
is obviously degraded, that wouldn't explain that huge difference
between it and the recreation, especially in how it's so much wider
than the Times New Roman recreation. Actually, I'm wondering now
if this this memo and at least some of the others were printed from
a
microfiche/film archive -- its deteriorated appearance looks very much
like that
shown in many of of Bush's official
records, most if not all of which came from microfiche/film. May
19, 1972 Memo
This also doesn't recreate that well with Times New Roman despite being
a relatively simple document. Note especially how the words drift out
of alignment in the 2nd paragraph relative to the words in the lines
above and below -- some typographers consider such relative positioning
a fingerprint of sorts. If you're not too sure what this means, look at
the position of "a flight status" on the 2nd line of paragraph two
relative to "have the time" in the line below it: on the original --
the
two phrases are offset by about a character. But then look how they
look in the Times New Roman
recreation -- the two phrases are almost perfectly lined up. A small
difference but certainly not a
trivial one -- it
indicates that the original was not done on a modern system. August
1, 1972 Memo
And this really doesn't
recreate well with Times New Roman, and the
relative misalignments are even more pronounced, especially in regards
to line endings -- note for example the position of "perform" relative
to "ordered" in the first paragraph of the original memo versus their
positions in the Times New Roman recreation. Again this is not at all a
trivial issue and it yet again points to the memos being originally
created on something other than a modern system. June
24, 1973 Memo
This is the other memo that CBS had but didn't use in its report. More
of the same -- gee, so you think this is why only
the next
memo, the CYA one, got the animation
treatment by Charles
Johnson of Little Green
Footballs? August
18, 1973 Memo
The (in)famous CYA memo that really drove the forgery charges. Besides
the very short February 2nd, 1972 memo the CBS didn't use, this is the
only memo that recreates at all well in Times New Roman. But note that
this is the shortest and simplest memos after that February 2nd memo,
hence being the next easiest one to recreate in a Times Roman/New Roman
font if the original had been created in any Times or Roman style font.
Also that "backdate" comment is supported by the official records --
it refers to the rating report
dated May 2nd, 1973. Bush's two prior rating reports were signed
off
by Killian & Harris, with an addtional endorsement by the then base
commander
Bobby Hodges, on May 26 and/or May 27 of 1971 and 1972. Those dates
were
not arbitrary -- they were
based on Bush's enlistment date of May 27, 1968,
making his annual reporting period for service and training May 27 -
May 26. Which
in turn
makes the May 2nd date for the 1973 rating report utterly anomalous,
hence very much supporting that it was indeed backdated. Not exactly
obvious stuff for any would-be forger to have figured out, nevermind
use
confidently in a supposedly forged document.... August
1973 Excerpt from a Draft Press Release Regarding the Redactron
Redactor Word Processor Overlaid with Arial Bold
This excerpt, courtesy of the kind folks at the
Charles
Babbage Institute, is from a 1973 draft press
release (and it was a draft, replete with typos and proofreader
markings) for the Redactron
Redactor, a very popular early 70's word processor, regarding
its use for preparing text for typesetting. The font used in the
draft resembles Arial Bold, which is what I used for the recreation,
along with 1.5 line spacing. This is despite Arial not actually
existing until about 1982; however, Arial is a rip-off of an
earlier font called Helvetica,
and so the font used in the draft is likely another Helvetica
knock-off. Despite all these degrees of separation, the animated
overlay doesn't come off all that badly, does it? Summary
If you read this far and still think the memos could have been
forged, you're an idiot.
