CBS Fonts

There has been a lot of noise about faked records of George Bush's service record in the Air National Guard.



This particular site (or try here if that doesn't work, or better yet, go here for a brief summary of the typography issues) goes into gory detail about how the fonts used are from Microsoft Word and a laser printer and not from a typewriter or whatever they had available in 1972. To be honest, I didn't read the whole thing - I got the point pretty fast.



But I did skim it all, and if you are interested in typography it is an interesting read.



Back in college (1985, 1986), Donald Knuth was writing his five book series Computers and Typesetting - it was a big deal, as it gave us poor slobs writing our Ph.D.s complete reproducible control over our papers. This was good! The old way of typing it on a typewriter and getting it exactly right was hard! A laser printer! A good thing! Incredibly detailed typesetting program! A good thing! (Martha Stewart would like typsetting with Tex.)



The cool thing was that Knuth would pay you if you found a typo in his drafts, which he published on the Internet. I found one, quite late in the process, and received a check for $2.56. I was so poor in college that I cashed it. Moron. I wish I had that check now - what a cool keepsake! (I did save an early draft of The TeX Book.)



My wife, God bless her, bought me the five book C&S series as my graduation present from the Ph.D. program. Since my "old family" was completely anti-intellectual (I am the only one to finish college out of four kids), this touched me greatly.



I wonder who CBS hired to verify the documents. Heads will roll over this one. A couple of more days of denial and someone is a goner.



(An alternate view that proposes that it was an old Selectric that made the documents is here.)