CBS and the document crisis

I have tried to stay out of the political stuff. Since religion and politics are the two things you are not supposed to discuss, I am already treading on thin ice to discuss religion as frequently as I do.

But I cannot stay out of this one. I have no idea if the CBS documents are real or not. We've had so many journalists in the last two years just make stuff up, that anything is possible.

But this is why I have to discuss this - by profession I am a computer programmer. I once specialized in the PostScript page description language, and was one of the first people on the web to publish information on that topic - I have a great deal of expertise in it, as I once worked for a typesetter that had to do lots of innovative things to typeset non-latin languages for embassies and Canadian government agencies.

The overlay that shows that the Killian document was created in Microsoft Word is particularly disingenuous. Modern typesetting systems that continue today in apps such as Word had their public debut with the arrival in 1984 of laser printers and Aldus PageMaker - these, combined with PostScript, were the killer apps that took documents out of the secretarial pool and put them on peoples' desktops.

These systems were designed to produce documents that looked like those produced by higher end document creation tools that preceeded them, things such as phototypesetters and the IBM selectronic. Nobody would have bought PageMaker, Apple Lisas or Macs, etc. if these programs could not do what was already being done.

So yes, it isn't particularly amazing that the variable pitched Times (or other serifed typeface) of a 1973 device can be overlaid with a 2004 Times-New-Roman Word document of today, and look similar. The people who first worked on Word and PageMaker aimed to do exactly this.

This does not prove the documents real. But it does show that all of this hullabaloo about fonts and low-resolution overlays that purport to show non-existent identicalness is the work of a bunch of blogging amateurs.

So it is not about politics, is it? No, professional pride. ;-)