Anyone from the MS-Word team around?
I am not sure how many people here are aware of the discussion going on right now about some supposed memos unearthed from the late 60s/70s. While the debate itself is political, the actual question is fairly technical. Someone pulled up the memos and started typing them into Microsoft Word (with the truetype Times New Roman) and discovered that the output looks identical to the supposidly old and typewritten memos from the 60s. In fact, It's even Superscripted exactly where Word auto superscripts. Never-mind the proportional fonts and the fact that the signature is now being called into question. The theory is that this may have been written in word and photocopied 10+ times.
Here is the original version:
Here is the new version typed in word and printed in PDF:
http://homepage.mac.com/cfj/.Pictures/aug1873-pdf-word.gif
Here are the two layered on top of each other:
http://homepage.mac.com/cfj/.Pictures/aug1873-pdf-overlay.gif
The debate has focused around the idea to try and disprove that any typewriter in the 60s/70s could have actually published this. Rather then try and prove a negative, how about prove a positive. Is there anything in this document that definitively proves that it is modern? In particular, there definitely seem to be some TrueType hinting going on (check out the my/regarding etc).
If this post is too political, I will happily remove it. I am more curious whether we can prove it was Word or not.