This may not seem like "news" to you, but the evidence presented to me so far has been remarkably weak. The attacks on the memos started within hours from someone who was not any kind of expert on fonts or typography (but was a known GOP operative), several witnesses have confirmed that the content of the memos is accurate about Lt. Bush, and we know that National Guard outlets of the time had typewriters capable of producing proportional type.

It was entirely possible that Col. Killian sat down one day and typed the memos for his own CYA file at some Guard typewriter. No one submitted definite proof otherwise, and all CBS has said is that it can no longer verify the authenticity of the memos - not that they were definitely forgeries.

Now I can say that they are forgeries, and we know this from the expert work of Adobe's Thomas Phinney. The question is whether the equipment of the day could have produced these exact memos, and Phinney says they could not.

Making Headlines, Not Setting Them: The incredibly bad reproduction of the memos makes it hard to state many things definitively. These things were first faxed, then scanned back into a computer, then exported back at really low resolution (about 120 dpi). At this point, it's hard to judge subtleties in letterforms. I've had debates about what the font was, based on this, and it's hard. But one thing that is not degraded by the reproduction is the simple question of relative line lengths. Where does each line end, relative to the lines above and below it? What letter lines up at the end of the line, between one and the next? Given proportionally spaced fonts, and a large enough sample (as the full set of four memos are), how each line aligns against its neighbors offers a sort of digital fingerprint of the widths of the font used. The degradation of the copy is no longer important.

Bottom line? The memos precisely match current digital versions of Times (and previous phototype and hot metal typesetting versions).

[...]The only two machines that have been touted as possible sources of the memos, which did not use monospaced fonts, were the IBM Executive typewriter, and the IBM Selectric Composer typesetter.

Now, the Executive did not offer switchable fonts, so you literally had to buy a different typewriter to get a different proportional font. None of them is particularly close to Times in design, and the one that I've seen which is closest is just much, much wider. Nobody would confuse it for Times. Somebody who claims to have worked for IBM at the time wrote that any font IBM had available was available for the Executive. This is a lie, unless you change the definition of "font" to somehow mean a general appearance similarity, not including the specific and exact widths and design. Any typographer uses it to mean the latter. I'll get back to this later, regarding widths...

Now, this eliminates all typewriters of that time. What remains are the low end of typesetting machines. First, one has to understand that these were not typewriters. They took more training to use, and were slower and less efficient. They also cost a lot of money, even the cheaper ones cost $4,000, which would be like $15,000 today. But these machines did offer justification, centering, and most of them had proportional spacing.

[...]Today's digital versions of Times have widths that descend from those used in Linotype's phototypesetting and earlier hot-metal versions. Monotype had previously had an even more original version, with different widths, but when Microsoft licensed Monotype's version, they wanted it to be compatible with Adobe's, so the widths were changed to match the Adobe/Linotype versions.

Thus not only do all the main digital versions of Times used today have the same widths, but they are all based on an earlier 18-units-relative-to-height ("to the em" in font-geek-speak) system, with common characters being 5 to 17 units wide. But the IBM Composer has letters that are 3 to 9 units wide, where 9 units is around 3/4 of the point size (the "em square" to typographers). So while current versions of Times have relatively discrete widths for common characters, these widths are at a "finer grain" than early typewriters or low-end typesetters of the '70s, such as the IBM Executive and Selectric Composer.

So what? Well, there's just no way you can get consistent matches between the line endings (indicating the relative line widths) of an IBM Composer and the common version of Times, when you look at exactly how things line up from one line to the next, and have a lot of lines of text -- like, say, four memos' worth.

[...] Finally, although I don't feel any need to promote my personal political views when talking about typography and forgery; those who know me well will be well aware that my own politics clearly had no influence on this analysis.

At the most generous, you could call the memos "reproductions" if you believe they are new versions of documents that actually exist or existed. If you don't, you have to call them "forgeries." The question of who created them and why remains open (it seems unlikely to me that Bill Burkett, who has spent so much of the past few years on Bush National Guard documentation, would shred his own credibility like this), but the question of whether they're genuine is now closed. They're not.

The content is known to be accurate, though, and it's still pretty telling how many media outlets and righty bloggers find they prefer typographical minutia to that relevant but inconvenient story.