This from Hugh Hewitt’s website, a communication from Professor Corky Cartwright at Rice. I suppose we’ll see a performance by Dan Rather with floppy shoes and a rubber nose. There’s really no response to this quality of scholarship and experience:

I am a Professor of Computer Science at Rice University who has followed the evolution of word processing technology over the past 30 years. A cursory glance at the “Killian documents” shows that they are forgeries, the product of a modern word processing system. Even the most powerful word processing systems available in the early 70′s were not designed to produce proportionally spaced documents. Moreover, no mechanical typewriter, even with variable letter widths like the IBM Executive typewriter, could produce precise proportional spacing comparable to a modern word processor. Precise proportional type-setting is a very demanding computational problem. Since modern PC’s are more powerful than supercomputers from the 70′s, we take this form of computation for granted….

The Killian memos could not have been typed on an IBM Executive typewriter with “proportional spacing” or any other typewriter using similar technology. According to product descriptions on the web, the IBM Executive typewriter supports only four different character widths. In contrast, modern proportional spacing involves a far more sophisticated type-setting algorithm. Every type font in Word (or any other modern word processing system) has a custom width for every character. Moreover, the spacing between individual pairs of characters is modified by a process called “kerning” that compensates for the fact that letters have varying shapes that affect our perception of proper spacing. To achieve an aesthetically pleasing result, the type-setting process must take into account the relationship between adjacent character shapes. For example, the letter “T” followed by the letter “o” looks badly spaced if the “o” is not tucked under the overhang provided by the top of the “T”. On the other hand, no such adjustment is appropriate if the letter “T” is followed by the letter “H”. In the Killian documents, you can clearly see the effects of kerning in pairs of letters such as “fo” and “fe”.

I am amazed that Dan Rather and his associates at CBS are blind to the overwhelming evidence that these documents are blatant forgeries.

Don’t be amazed yet, Corky. There’s worse to come.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 10th, 2004 at 4:49 pm and is filed under General, New Media, Red Shift. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.