Viewers Are Geniuses: Difference between revisions

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*** However, Times ''New'' Roman (the font used in the forgery) is not the exact same font as Times Roman, and did not exist in 1973. Furthermore, Times Roman was under exclusive license to the Times newspaper in that decade and would not possibly have been used in semi-official US government correspondence. In addition, variable-width typesetting was possible in that era only for typesetting machines (the two 'typewriters' capable of doing so, the IBM Selectric Composer and the Varityper, were in practice desktop typesetting machines) and TrueType font kerning (also used in the forgery) wasn't possible ''at all''.

*** For that matter, simply looking up image scans from the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library (the forgery's alleged date was 1973) would show you what kind of typewriter the personal secretary of the President of the United States used in that year (answer: an ordinary IBM Selectric, which uses the fixed-width Courier font), making the idea that a far more expensive IBM model was being used by the secretary of an obscure US Air Force colonel in the Texas Air National Guard completely laughable.

** In addition to noticing the typesetting errors, bloggers also pointed out that the abbreviations and signature block formatting used in the letter were from the document style guide used by the ''Army'', not the Air Force (there are slight difference between the two). As it turned out, the original forger was a retired Army officer.