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An Excuse to Play with Photoshop

So I've been intrigued by the speculation that recently released documents about George Bush's military service might have been forged. The blogospere is in a veritable tizzy. To be clear: I could hardly care less whether George Bush was actually AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard 30 years ago, it's the documents themselves that have piqued my curiosity.

Thus, being a Photoshop nerd, I've decided to check it out myself. Before I started, I checked out best arguments that I could find that lay out the case for and against forgery. Then I went to work.

I've seen claims that simply typing the memo into Microsoft Word using default settings will yield an exact match to the memo. This isn't precisely true. I first had to modify my margins to match the memo (1.5 inches on the left, 1 inch on the right) and then disable the "auto-list" feature that will automatically indent numbered lists as you type them. But otherwise, it came out pretty darn close (click for a larger view):

A lot of speculation has centered around the font used in the memo, and that this font, as printed on the memo, could only have been produced from a modern computer. In fact, Times New Roman is a typeface has been around for quite some time, having been created in 1931 for the Times of London.

Now, a font is a font. Whether it's displayed on a computer screen or typed with a typewriter or printed on a printing press, it's supposed to look nearly the same in every case. When the personal computer and desktop publishing exploded onto the scene, most electronic fonts were created to mimic existing fonts as closely as possible. This includes not only the shape of the letters, but the spaces between the letters. So you can see how, after aligning the margins correctly, a memo typed in Microsoft Word can match a memo typed on an advanced typewriter in 1973.

Still, let's look real close. Here's one chunk of text, selected more or less at random. The top line is from my Word document, the bottom is from the TANG memo. Even after multiple photocopies and scanning, you can tell that the memo looks slightly different. One thing stands out for me, the letters all appear taller and skinnier in the Word document, look especially at the ascenders and descenders in letters like p, k, d, b, etc.

Now look at this chunk of text and you will see a similar difference, especially in the controversial ^th. What's this prove? Nothing. We won't know anything for certain until someone recreates the memo using a 1973-era typewriter.