The Shifting Baseline: PROOF that the documents were typewritten

[athena]

This argument has been made over and over, but the trolls and RW DUers pretend not to notice it.

The argument that the documents are forged is that supposedly, they can be duplicated in Word.

Zoom in to any of the documents, and you will notice a shifting baseline, not to mention irregularities in the shapes of the letters.

No computer text editor can do this.

End of argument.

[htuttle]

1. I've noticed and said this too -- just TRY to make Word do that

But the naysayers NEVER respond to it.

Perhaps they will here.

[Fridays Child]

6. I don't know what a shifting baseline is but this Flash presentation...

...where the original is overlaid with a copy produced by computer, using Palatino Linotype, is a fraud:

http://img41.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img41&image=60minbusted.swf

If you zoom in on it, as the two copies come together, you can clearly see that they do not match. But the Flash artist first fades out one copy and then the other, making it impossible to discern without close scrutiny.

[athena]

8. To me, what indicates that the documents are real is ...

that this is the best the skeptics can do. All the points made by that flash movie have been debunked.

What I mean by a baseline is the line that the words sit on. When something is written on a typewriter, the paper shifts slightly every once in a while, so that the letters don't all end up exactly on the same line. If you zoom into any of the documents, you see this effect. You can't get such little, random shifts in Word, or on any text editor.

I can't figure out how to post images. Perhaps someone can post some examples ... or explain to me how I can post an image file that's on my computer and not on the internet.

[Fridays Child]

16. Go here to post an image...

www.photobucket.com. Open a free account, upload your pic, then just copy and paste the URL for the picture into your DU post.

[athena]

18. Thanks!

[Nicholas_J]

40. Another possibility

Is that these copies were copies that were scanned by someone trying to get their hands on them without anyone being aware of it, and so the font would default to whatrever the default font of the OCR scanning program was. In this manner , with the right software, one can get the text and the signature on the same document, but the fonts would be copied in the default font of the program.

This would account for the secretary affirming the content, but stating that the documents were essentially correct.

[Fridays Child]

42. Very interesting! have you posted this to any of the other "secretary...

...threads?" Or better yet start a thread with the information.

[Nicholas_J]

46. I think I posted it to one other

But it does make a lot of sense. While the sectretary who would have typed the memos says they are a forgery, she claims the content is accurate. If anyone was trying to get these things out of an areas where files were kept and which had no photocopier in the area (a secured document area does not keep photocopies within the area, but you must get permission to have the documents copied for you).

If they were carrying a portable notebook scanner with OCR capability, (and some of these are small enough to fit into an inner jacket pocket and are not flatbed, but form fed, so they are about the size of a very small collapsable umbrella) the iten could be scanned and even scanned into a PDA with portable word if necessary.

Some of the more expensive portable scanners have onboard scanning capacity, so you can scan without the computer, keep the scanned file in the scanners buffer, and then run it through the ocr software when you get to a computer.

It is just a thought, and seems to be a possibility given the fact that the content is reputedly correct, accoring to the few people who would know, but the documents themselves appear to be faked.

[okieinpain]

43. this is very interesting. that would really explain a lot.

[Beetwasher]

2. Of Course. The Idiosyncracies Are Apparent

to anyone and can only be attributed to the memos having been done on a typewriter. Some of this is due to copy degredations, but not all of it, certainly not the baseline deviations or some of the more obvious ribbon smears or uneven indentations. If these are forgeries (which I doubt), they were done on a typewriter anyway. This MS Word bullshit is totally ridiculous.

[TexasUnderground]

17. You can get baseline deviations simply by lightly crumpling the paper

And then photocopying. I just tried it out.

[athena]

19. Scan it in, and show us.

You can't get the same kind of baseline shift by crumpling the paper. The shifts are very distinctive of typewritten documents.

[Heath.Hunnicutt]

32. There is no WAY you could do that, Tex.

What you could never accomplish by crumpling the paper are the wonderfully consistent baseline changes you can see in the recorded letterhead. It's always the last character in the line of letterhead that is most dropped; that's a sign of a mechanical printer.

I usually support the "fringe" who make fair comments, but I am wondering about you.

[Must_B_Free]

45. Just like the Brady Bunch

Alice was given away by the signature of the typewriter...

[ET Awful]

3. I've come to the conclusion that all Freepers have a fear of optometry

They all need glasses, otherwise they'd be able so see the simple fact that the characters don't line up along the baseline.

I pointed that out the first time I saw the memos questioned, but I have yet to hear a single right-wingnut respond to it with an actual answer other than "they match" (which they obviously don't).

[athena]

4. I see that this argument is still being ignored.

It's amazing how this point shuts people up.

[gollygee]

5. I agree - if they're forgeries they were done on a typewriter.

Not saying they aren't forgeries. Anyone could have gotten an old typewriter and done it that way. But it seems silly to say they were done on a word processor.

[troublemaker]

7. Hi Athena. I beleieve that if you investigate this matter you

Hi Athena. I beleieve that if you investigate this matter you will find that the dancing baselines is a function of repeated xeroxing. It has to with the inevitable slight angle of the source document whenever a copy is made. After enough re-copying it becomes rather pronounced.

[athena]

9. No, you are wrong.

You can't get such shifts by xeroxing. Xeroxing would produce random shifts, not shifts where different parts of a word sit on a different lines.

[troublemaker]

22. All I can do is tell you the truth. I cannot make you believe it.

[athena]

25. The "truth"?

Very funny. Look at my post #21 in this thread. And then tell me, with a straight face, that such shifts can be produced by photocopying. It's very clear which distortions are caused by photocopying and scanning and which distortions are caused by the paper shifting under the typewriter.

[troublemaker]

29. Do you want to argiue what the capital of Maryland is? I'm taking Anapolis

Yes, truth. Try it on the quality xerox everybody used before the digital units. Slight angles in the original force baselines to fall on one or another line of resolution. After a few generations the letters can wander around like crazy. This isn't something I'm making up for fun, it's a real-world phenomenon.

And don't get me started on faxes. The resolution is so low that everything I've said is X 10

[athena]

33. Exactly, they "wander around like crazy".

That's exactly my point. They can produce random shifts, but they can't produce the systematic shifts in the documents, which are virtually the trademark of typewritten documents. They would shift edges etc., but they wouldn't shift the baseline the way a typewriter would.

[Mr_Spock]

47. Yeah, you're really full of crap on this one.

There is absolutely NO question that those shifts are due to typing. NO question.

[troublemaker]

26. helpful LINK

http://www.mahablog.com/2004.09.05_arch.html#1094852190259

Why? Because, if you need to measure type (body size, ledding, letter spacing) and match it exactly, you have to work with original documents. If you are measuring a photocopy of an original document, the measurements can be off by half a point or more. If you are measuring a photocopy of a photocopy, the distortion grows to more than a point. If you are measuring a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy scanned into a PDF file, e.g. the Killian documents, forget it. The "kerning" and letter spacing you think you see may or may not exist on the original document. Probably not, in fact.

I know this because I learned it from my old film patching days. If all I had to work with was a photocopy, my patch wouldn't match. I had to measure the original printed page.

So, let's dispense with the "proportional type" theory. I've looked at the PDF files, and IMO the quality thereof is too far removed from the original (the wavy baselines are a dead giveaway) to know what the original type proportion was. And any "kerning" one might see is probably the result of distortion that occurs in photocopies that are generations removed from an original.

[htuttle]

10. They appear quite differently

What you describe does obscure the baseline, but in a way so that the 'fuzzy' bottoms of all the letters are still aligned. In addition, there is no way to 'rotate' various letters at different angles than the others as we see in the Killian documents. If you look closely, not only do the baselines of the letters not line up, the baselines of various letters are also very slightly tilted to one angle or another.

This is due to the paper moving slightly as the ball of the typewriter hits it. There really wouldn't be a way to reproduce this on a computer without using high-end illustration software (like Illustrator) and laying out the memo letter-by-letter. I can't see anyone going to that depth of forgery, and allowing what others have called 'markers' in? Why not use Courier if forging it if you are going to go through the trouble of laying out the whole memo letter by letter?

It makes no sense, and the White House still refuses to answer the questions raised by documents who's bona fides have never been called into question. This whole 'forgery' thing has to be the biggest and most intensive flurry of propaganda and spin I have ever witnessed in my life.

[Beetwasher]

12. Wrong

Not variations between letters within a single word. And if you look closely at the actual text on the document, you not only see the baseline deviations, but other very obvious imperfections that indicate it was done on a typewriter. See the post below.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=810021&mesg_id=811469&page=

[troublemaker]

30. please see #26

and yes, on individual letters within words. Really!

[Beetwasher]

39. Nope

See the link I provided. The idiosyncracies are only easily explained by a typewriter. Funny, how the explanations of why this document has all the hallmarks of being written on a typewriter keep getting more and more convoluted. The easiest explanation is *gasp* it was typed. Does that mean it's NOT a forgery? No. Just that it wasn't done on MS Word, but was actually typed, which would be the intelligent way to go about forging something like this anyway.

[NewYorkerfromMass]

11. Well regardless, the sec'y says her typewriter at the time was different

An Olympia, NOT an IBM. But no matter, what's in them is TRUE!!!!

[athena]

13. And there was only one secretary?

Don't change the subject. What some secretary says is not "proof" of anything. Prove to me that she was the secretary, that she is telling the truth, that she was not bribed, and that she is nonpartisan, and then we'll talk.

The point of this thread is that the allegation that the documents were produced by Word is pure BS.

Edited to add: Sorry, I didn't read your post carefully enough. I thought you were arguing that the documents are forged. In any case, this is not proof.

[TexasUnderground]

14. No, sorry

Your pathological obsession as to the truthfulness of this story is pure BS. Ever hear of blowback?

The secretary says Bush was selected, not elected. That doesn't sound like a bribed right winger to me.

She also says that the memos are more or less in line with what was discussed in the office around the time Shrub was there, but that the documents themselves are forgeries. The office only had Olympias and Selectrics, neither of which are capable of producing those documents.

[athena]

15. Don't change the subject.

Typical freeper tactic. We are not idiots.

It's very easy to bribe someone to pretend to be a liberal and claim that she didn't type the documents.

The burden of proof is still on you, freep. And what someone who claims to have been the secretary says is not proof.

[TexasUnderground]

23. Uh, just because I'm skeptical

Doesn't mean I'm a freeper, and it's a convenient way to deflect criticism of your position. "Oh, you don't agree with me, you must be a freeper".

Lets consider: what's the damage to the party if *I'm wrong* and the docs are legit: We lose a minor piece of evidence that confirms what everyone already knows. That Bush used his connections to avoid Vietnam and that he didn't even fulfill those connections. Everyone knows this already!

Now, lets consider what happens if *you* are wrong and the documents are forged. Not only do we lose *this* point, our credibility will be called into question on almost every other point where documentation comes into play.

In my humble oppinion we are risking a whole lot for very little return, ie, just to confirm again our own already well documented facts. It's not smart politics.

[athena]

28. That is not the point.

The documents may turn out to be forgeries, although I strongly doubt it. But if they do, they will still be forgeries produced by a typewriter. My only point in this thread is that the documents were not produced by Word or some other text editor program. The main argument of the skeptics is that the documents can be duplicated in Word, and it continues to be repeated despite this very strong evidence that they were typed. Changing the topic to what some secretary says obscures this point and allows the freepers to perpetuate the ridiculous assertion that the documents have been proven to have been produced by Word. After all, there is a separate thread for discussing the problem of the secretary.

My sincere apologies if you're not a freeper.

[TexasUnderground]

34. Ah, ok

I won't change the topic then (I'm browsing furtively from work and haven't hit every topic yet).

I'll post my images when I get home, assuming I can get my scanner to work.

[Heath.Hunnicutt]

24. And Killian had her type everything for his 'secret' file? nt

[Heath.Hunnicutt]

27. She did not exactly say that...

Nobody ever said that document had to be typed on a Selectric, or even an IBM. The first place I saw that idea was on LGF, where I assume it was an honest idea. (Who knows, maybe it was another Stove Pipe operation.)

My belief is that Killian typed some of these on a pre-desktop-computer word processor. I think it was something that could get sub-pixel accuracy with centering. That's impressive.

She did seem to be quoted saying they weren't typed by her, and probably weren't typed on her typewriter. That seems fine.

[Heath.Hunnicutt]

20. I couldn't agree more.

I'm a computer programmer, and I have to say I agree with you.

But mostly: kick

[athena]

21. Example

Notice how the baseline shifts in the word "running". Notice the shift and distortion of the A in "Alabama". The B in "Bush" is also shifted. The t in "wasn't" is both shifted and distorted. In the sentence "I will not rate", "I will" is placed lower than "not rate". All these features are very distinctive of typewritten documents. This is just one small portion of one of the documents, and I haven't even listed all the shifts and distortions in it.

[troublemaker]

36. I hope you notice that the same letter appears differently

old typewriter letter placements vary because of varriation in the mechanics. Each typewriter has it's own signature, like the g's fall a little high and left... something like that.

Now notice how the lower case a's fall on different levels throughout the doc. It's copier drift. Really.

I'm on your side. I hope you put all questions to rest. I just don't think the jaggy baseline argument is a good road to follow.

[athena]

37. Well,

I would agree, for example, that in "wasn't" the edges of the "asn" are blurred by the copying and scanning. But the shift in the last part of "running"?

In the word "rating", for example, the lower parts of the letters are being blurred away. But the baseline isn't shifting. Whereas in "I will not rate", it definitely is.

Many people look at the documents without zooming in and are amazed at how good they look. They think that such clean documents could not have been produced by a typewriter thirty years ago. But when you tell them to zoom in and look at the shifting baseline, they realize that it's not so pretty and clean after all. Up close, the documents look typewritten. Similarly, if you superimpose a version made by Word, you don't see the discrepancies until you've zoomed in.

[troublemaker]

38. The instance of "running" is just what I'm talking about.

The angle difference is to subtle for the resolution so the baseline seems to jump up suddenly. The words and letters are hammered into a lower res grid and it creates odd distortions. (Often counter-intuitive distortions because we see letters as symbols rather than fields of densities of gray.)

BTW Did you read the link? I thought that was a good article because she's so unassuming. I used to do what she's talking about -- copy fitting. Whan the client would do a mockup from xeroxes of out typeset it seldom fit when we used the actual typeset. And those were first genration xeroxes.

[athena]

48. The link is great.

I also looked at some of her other entries, which are also very good.

But it seems to me that she isn't talking about exactly the same thing there. She isn't claiming that you can't tell from looking at a photocopied document that it was typewritten. She refers to "wavy baselines" (not shifting baselines) to argue that you can't make any conclusions about proportional type and kerning by looking at scans of photocopies of photocopies. The baselines are wavy, but they also shift. I'm a physicist, and it seems extremely unlikely to me that a whole line would shift, the upper parts of a letter shifting exactly the same way as its lower parts. I think the process you describe is happening in the word "rating" but not in "running" or "Alabama".

Anyway, I'm not a typing expert (although I used to type on a typewriter back in the early 1990s). But to the eye of a layperson, while the documents may at first look like they were made by Word, they definitely appear to have been typewritten up close.

[Hepburn]

51. You are...

...IMO exactly correct. Maybe people can see it more easily with a red base line added. The characters jump all over and this is not consistent with some movement from copying. It looks like it is from a typewriter - just as you described.

http://tinypic.com/57aso

I cannot get this to post as an image. If someone could do this please, it would be appreciated.

[athena]

54. Thank you.

It seems that the link is displayed as an image only if it ends in .gif or .jpg etc.

[xrepub]

31. Am I the only logician here?

Whether or not these documents could have been produced by Word is irrelevant.

You could prove that these documents were forgeries if you could prove that they could not have been produced by a typewriter available at the time. If you cannot prove that, then this line of attack on the documents is invalid.

[Sparkly]

35. Thank you.

Once again, we're trying to prove a negative. We're trying to prove that it is NOT a forgery.

Why isn't the burden of proof on those who claim it's a forgery?

[NewYorkerfromMass]

49. Q: "Why isn't the burden of proof on those who claim it's a forgery?"

Because clearly Bush is above all reproach. In fact he is Jesus Christ (the Lord) incarnate.
Get with the program.

[MUSTANG_2004]

52. At the risk of jumping into this...

Someone (Joseph Newcomer) is saying exactly that.

http://www.flounder.com/bush2.htm

Specifically, he says the way the 'r' is tucked under the 'f' in 'from' was not available in any technology used by office workers:

"The 'r' is tucked under the 'f' in the same way a Microsoft font does it. In 1972, technology available in the office, including proportional typewriters, could not do this."

[athena]

56. Sorry, but that sounds like utter BS to me.

The way the r is tucked under the f is a function of "technology"? Come on.

One of the links above explains how you can't make arguments about kerning and proportional spacing based on scanned documents.

[against all enemies]

41. I don't believe there are no other documents typed from that era.

They would be proof as far as the typewriter is comcerned. What about the context of the memo? He got special treatment, had higher ups covering his ass, failed to report for a physical as ordered, and left early. What there isn'r true?

Kerry should suggest during debates that all National guard servicemen should be able to leave when ever they want, just like George W> Bush. How many planes would be filled out of Iraq?

[Tansy_Gold]

44. oh my goodness -- I may have some things

I'm a writer, have been since I was a kid in the late 50s, early 60s. I've written on a gazillion different machines. And I NEVER throw anything away.

whether any of you will believe me or not, I can't do anything about that. But give me an hour or so and I'll see what I can come up with in terms of ORIGINAL documents typed on a variety of typewriters.


Tansy Gold

[athena]

50. Kick.

People are still going on about how the documents were created on Word. Hello? :eyes:

[Hepburn]

53. I tried to do this on...

...both MSW and on WP. No way could I do this and I have been word processing for ages on typewriters, dedicated word processors, and computers. I am more comfortable with WP, and no matter what I did, this program will not even closely duplicate those memos. It just cannot be done...unless I resort to photoshop, etc., to help me along with this. Which IMO is what is seen in the videos and overlays which claim that MSW lines up "perfectly" with the Killian memos. BS on that.

[Cogito ergo doleo]

55. Not created in word.

There are typographical inconsistencies consistent with a mechanically produced document, and the typeface is probably not MS Times New Roman (or Prestige, which was a typeface available to IBM at the time).





This is difficult because the documents are not the originals, and I do not have access to an IBM Selectric or a character map of the typefaces, however, a font is a font, is a font. The characters are highly balanced and engineered. There is very little to a font in terms of pixels or weight and if fonts were not highly individuated, you could not tell Verdana from Arial, or Times New Roman on the web which is a very low resolution. Some integrity of the font, regardless of how many times it was photocopied, would remain.

I have not studied the other documents yet to see their inconsistencies. The above: http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/BushGuardaugust18.pdf on the CBS web site.