I find it interesting to see otherwise highly intelligent and well
educated people stubbornly cling to one flimsy premise when presented
with a conundrum.  I think it is the foundation for the saying: "can't
see the forest for the trees."

Wirt's assertion is that since the lines on the memos are wavy, they
could not come from an "electronic type-setting mechanism" such as a
laser or inkjet printer, I presume.  These memos HAD to have been
produced by a "mechanical typewriter."  Irrespective of the overwhelming
mountain of evidence showing that these memos had to come from an MS
Word driven device, that the content was not proper for the Air Force
and that the secretary of the time said they were bogus, as long as the
lines of text are wavy, they could only have come from a mechanical
typewriter.

A corollary to the statement would be why did the incredibly detailed
web page not even address this issue of wavy lines?  The answer is
simple, it is not an issue.  Let me explain.

The typewriter I had at home in the late sixties and early seventies was
an Olivetti machine.  I have absolutely no idea what model it was.  It
was gray and had lots of keys.  It had the fonts for the letters at the
end of long stems.  I am sure there are proper names for all these
parts; I have no idea what they are.  It was a sleek machine, but it was
all manual.  There was absolutely now power assist here.  :-)

When I typed a text on the Olivetti, two things stood out when I looked
at the completed product.  The first one was the appearance of some
waves in the lines of text.  Closer examination of this phenomenon
revealed that in fact these were not waves intrinsically built into the
lines, but rather that some letters always typed at a position slightly
above or below the others.  You see, if the stems with the characters
were just a smidgen longer or shorter than they should be, the printed
character would be a little higher or lower.  When viewed from above, it
was interesting to see the arrangements of these stems.  Only the middle
one was straight, all the others would have a bend to them, more
pronounced the further away from the middle they found themselves.

So, the characteristic of a mechanical typewriter would be to have
specific letters out of step with the remainder and to varying degrees.
In other words, if the letter 'h' typed lower than the others, it would
ALWAYS be lower than the others.  If the letter 'k' typed a little
higher, it would ALWAYS type a little higher.

About the only time you would get a perfectly straight line was when you
repeatedly typed the same character, as for example the underscore "_",
because the carriage itself would not go up and down, producing waves.

If you look at the fake memos, you can readily see that the "wave" is
not repeated for specific characters.  Indeed it seems to affect
portions of lines, including the ones above and below.  This is more
consistent with someone producing a nice output and crumpling the page
deliberately, flattening it out and then photocopying it.  Voila,
instant old typewriter look.  Unless you look closely.

I am not aware of ANY mechanical typewriter as I have described with
proportional fonts and capable of kerning or even pseudo-kerning.

I am aware that electric typewriters with the 'golf ball' head had the
capability of producing proportional fonts, but certainly not kerning.
However, one of the great benefits of these 'golf ball' typewriters was
they virtually eliminated the wavy text.  The output they produced was
far superior to what the mechanical ones produced and that was one of
their main selling features.

Now, by now, you probably think that I forgot to talk about the other
characteristic of the output of a mechanical typewriter.  And you would
be wrong.  Since the mechanical typewriter depended on human power to
strike the letter, some letter would be struck more lightly than others.
Therefore the text would have various degrees of character definition,
so to speak but on a letter basis.  This was more pronounced with touch
typists because certain fingers would be weaker than others.  If you
look at the fake memos, you do not see that at all.

But wait a hunt and peck typist would not produce a document where the
characters would vary in intensity.  Since only one or perhaps two
fingers would be used, the keys would all be struck with approximately
the same force.  We all know that LtCol Killian hated to type.
Therefore he must have been the one to type the fake memos, which is why
the secretary could state that she didn't type these memos. (Let's
ignore the fact she called them fake also.)

Fair enough, except that now, we have someone who hates to type,
probably because he does not have the skills to do so and maybe even
considers the task to be beneath him, (and we all remember how Wirt
feels about Colonels, right?) producing perfectly centered and
letter-perfect memos.  Wirt has reviewed for us, and has had reinforced
by private mail, how one can achieve such a feat with a typewriter.  At
that time I responded to Wirt, expressing my veritable joy at being able
to agree with him that these memos were fake.  I would have paid real
money to see a Lieutenant Colonel in the Texas Air National Guard going
through all the motions described by Wirt and his anonymous
correspondent, to PERFECTLY center the heading of a memo to a
subordinate and putting a fake address in the heading and mistyping his
title at the bottom.  All this without a single typo.


Denys


-----Original Message-----
From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Wirt Atmar
Sent: Thursday, September 16, 2004 11:09 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] OT: Rathergate, the conclusion?

Denys writes:

> I found this
>
>  http://homepage.mac.com/cfj/newcomer/index.htm
>
>  Warning, this page falls under the heading "more than you ever wanted
to
>  know about fonts."

That page contains nothing but crap. No computer produced that text. All
you need do is look at the baseline of the letters in the images. They
vary up and down in the manner that mechanical typewriters produce text.
No electronic text-setting mechanism has ever done anything like that.

Wirt Atmar

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