September 11, 2004
Killian Memos and Kerning
Hosted at the request of RainaBear.orgNote: Before you read this, I know that what I'm talking about in this article is not technically kerning. What I'm talking about here has been called character spacing, psudo kerning, first degree adjustment, etc. etc. I don't care what you call it. The point is, it's there in Word and the memos and not in the IBM Selectric Composer text.
Note number 2: One of the amusing things about having this up and getting lots of hits is that I can follow referrals and see what people are saying about me. Mostly it has been enlightening and helped me to fix some errors and explore some other questions. However, I really enjoyed this sniping little argument going on over at forums.appleinsider.com. It was quite amusing, thanks guys. And just to clear up some points for those people who come over with any sort of partisan blinders on, I actually consider myself to be a libertarian but I'm pretty young and I'm still settling down into my political views. I've been a flaming liberal and a staunch conservative at different times in my 24 years.
As to who I am, I'm a 24 year old woman with bachelors degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering. I'm currently working on a masters in Electrical Engineering. I don't have any formal experience in typesetting or word processing or anything, but like most people I have eyes and a brain, as well as an interest in technical issues. I don't think the questions here are so complex that you have to be an expert to think about them. Trusting only in experts and not in our own faculties leaves us completely at the mercy of the experts, and what happens if they don't agree? Apparently then some people just agree with the expert who happens to be on their political side. Certainly this doesn't mean that I'm not going to listen to experts, but I'm going to look at their arguments and reasoning, not just their conclusions. In this case, the experts certainly seem to be coming down on the side of forgeries anyway.
And finally, as some have laughingly hinted at, I'm not Karl Rove or some other black Republican conspirator who has started this blog for some sneaky reason. This blog is something that a friend of mine has intermitently been working on coding for about three months, and since he has more bandwidth than I do, I asked him to host this entry of mine, which was originally on my website rainabear.org, which I have been using to write intermintant completely non-political journal entries in for about 2 and a half years. You can go there and check and send me email to that address or whatever.
I don't usually talk about politics in my journal, but I just can't help it in this case. This CBS forged memos thing is just absolutely hilarious and sickening at the same time. I've been glued to the computer over the past few days reading everything there is to read.
I've been very interested in all of the technical explanations and the many examples of comparisons between the memos, including the exact match between one of the memos and the exact same thing typed in Microsoft Word and the inexact match between one of the memos and the exact same thing typed on an IBM Selectric Composer.
Through all of this, there's been much talk about kerning, which is where pairs of letters in a certain order are closer together than they are when they are in the opposite order. However, no one has actually done an analysis of the document with pictures to prove that there is kerning, so I decided I'd try it in Photoshop.
I downloaded the documents from CBS, and opened up the one dated August 18, 1973. Then I picked a letter pair that kerns in Microsoft Word, but doesn't kern (or at least not as much) in the opposite order. I found several instances of each letter pair in the document and pasted them into a new document so that they would line up. Here are the results:
Both of the ta sets were lined up by the leftmost line on the t and the right most line on the a . This was somewhat difficult because the document has been copied so many times that all of the letters look slightly different. However, I'm certain that it is exact enough to prove my point.
Likewise the three at sets were lined up by the rightmost curve of the a and the rightmost line of the t .
Then the leftmost characteristic, the slash of the t on the ta pairs and the curve of the a on the at pairs, of the two different sets were lined up with one another. Then a line was lined up with the rightmost characteristic of the ta pairs to see if it lined up with the rightmost characteristic of the at pairs.
Obviously it does not. The line actually intersects with the next letter after the at pairs. The at pair is thinner than the ta pair. This is kerning.
As an example, I did the same thing using 12 pt Times New Roman font in Microsoft Word.
Here again, it is obvious that there is kerning. Since this image has not been copied over and over, we can see the source of the kerning: the tail of the a is under the slash of the t . If you look at the at pair in " coat " from the memos, you can also see that the tail of the a is under the slash of the t .
NO TYPEWRITER CAN KERN because the typewriter does not know what letters are next to the letter you are typing when you type it. A word processor on a computer can do that, because it makes adjustments to what you have typed previously as you go. A typesetter can also do this because they can have sets of letters on the same block.
No typewriter wrote this memo. The only other options are that the document is a forgery, or that Killian sent out his personal memos to file to a typesetter.
Yet another nail in the coffin.
By the way, I also wanted to do an analysis of some typewritten text from an IBM Selectric Composer to prove (for absolute morons) that typewriters can not do kerning, but I can't find an example in good enough quality that has both the at and ta pairs. If anyone comes across anything, email me at raina at rainabear dot org.
Update: While there are no at and ta pairs to compare on the text typed on the IBM Selectric Composer, there are at pairs. I looked at the at pairs on the memo compared to the text typed by Gerry Kaplan.
The set typed on the typewriter certainly do not look kerned. However, it is also noticeable that the a 's on the typewriter do not have the tail sticking out as far as on the memo. This takes out the possibility of kerning for this letter set altogether, since the tail can't go under the cross of the t and still be readable. I expect this is precisely the main difference between the Press Roman and Times New Roman, and the reason why the spacing here is not much different between the memo and the typewritten text. However, there are enough differences to tell that they aren't the same.
Update: Okay, I'm confused. Everyone has been talking about how kerning is turned off in Microsoft Word automatically. I just typed the same sentence twice in Microsoft Word and then turned the kerning option on for the second sentence. They look exactly the same.
Apparently then the whole kerning option objection is a red herring. The Times New Roman font must be kerned automatically. Anyone else want to try this and see what they think?
Also, someone said that it only looks kerned because some of the characters overlap. I did another experiment in Word where I typed a character and then left the cursor right after it so I could see where the character ends.
The f does indeed overlap, or hang over into the next space, but the a does not, which is the one we're concerned with here.
Update: Some have been complaining about the smudging in the Word at/ta pic above. Here it is again without smudging. (That was something Photoshop was doing automatically when resizing.) Clearly the width is different.
