Thomas Phinney on those damned forged Air National Guard memos

Interview with Adobe's Thomas Phinney, by Sandee Cohen, from creativepro.com.

The discussion of these memos that's filtered down to me has been extremely incomplete. Phinney's a genuine expert in the field of digital typography, and he covers his topic like a horse blanket. He explains how he concludes that the font in the forged memos is Times Roman, in terms a normal person can understand, while at the same time making the incredibly bad reproduction a non-issue. He identifies the two typewriter-like devices available in 1972 that had proportional spacing and (to my satisfaction, anyway) eliminates either of them as a source for the memos. Excellent illustrations in pdf format are included.

Phinney also discusses the unevenness of the baselines in the forgeries which have led some to believe that they must have been typed on a typewriter. Phinney points out what's known to everybody who's ever had to recreate artwork from a faxed original: that the low resolution of the fax process tends to introduce irregularities in letter forms which may be made worse if the fax is a bit crooked on the page, which isn't unusual.

There's also discussion of how Word treats ordinals and superscripts and how in spots it looks as if the forger took steps to defeat Word's automatic superscripting.

Now what I want to know is how such obvious forgeries got through CBS's fact-checking apparatus.