Rather Is An Idiot!
Welcome to the Rumes of BOZ. I am a concerned conservative that has observed the growing influence of the blogosphere in reflecting public opinion and allowing the “common man” to finally have a voice against the media bias in our great country. I’m not sure where this will go but I have a few thoughts to share. Feel free to add your comments.
My first job as a teenager was in an inplant print shop. I had to create pasteup art and I had to typeset copy using an IBM Composer. Having been in the typesetting, printing, and graphic arts business for 35 years, I can assure you that the documents that Dan Rather and CBS used to vilify President Bush's guard service that look like they were typed in Word ARE ABSOLUTELY NOT FROM THE 70's. I did the exact same thing that Charles at Little Green Footballs did using Word and achieved the same results. If you didn't buy galley sheet type created with hot lead LinoType machines you used clunky mechanical typesetting equipment in the early 70's (IBM Selectrics and Composers). IBM Composers could force justify but did not have curved quotation marks or apostrophes on the IBM type balls and were awkward and time consuming to use. The media lamely attempts to say the Composer had proportional font spacing. Not really, the spacing was better than non-proportional spacing but far cruder than what computers do more precisely today. You could not accurately kern letters on the Composer. The Composers were also very expensive and not used as a casual correspondence typewriter. I would be extremely skeptical of anyone who claimed that the government provided Composers to any Guard unit just to type correspondence and memos. You typed on clay coat paper and used it as galley type for paste-up. You had to double type and use a manual dial system for spacing and kerning. Inch and footmarks had to do double duty. VERY expensive code-driven, proprietary equipment started coming on the scene in the late 70's that allowed you to do the proportional spacing and create superscripts more easily. However, this equipment (Itek, Addressograph/Multigraph, Compugraphic, etc.) was output to some kind of photographic paper or film output (because of the high resolution needed to make good type) and was NEVER used as a casual stand-alone word processor or typewriter for memos and correspondence. They were used to produce type to be printed. They were never coupled with a plain paper output device. Even with code-driven typesetters you still had to do a lot of manual work to get even close to what Word blindly does on a simple computer. Commercial typewriters DID NOT use proportional spacing and superscripts, especially those that would have been bought in bulk for the military. Don't let anyone convince you otherwise. Fonts can still be a tricky thing to use even today on Macs or PC's with Quark and Illustrator. There are so many versions of fonts and in the graphics business you have to be careful of reflow of type. To think Charles simply whipped out his version in no time at all! On default settings no less! When you add up all the specifics that others in the business have pointed out (superscripts, proportional spacing, kerning, Times New Roman, the "4" seemingly is unique to Times New Roman, auto-centering, etc., etc., etc.) Those of us in the business do not need a document expert to determine that Democrats and liberals are desperate enough to forge this stuff and then even blame the Republicans for setting the whole thing up. Rather is such a buffoon... Once again, the new media helps bring out the truth. A lot of credit goes to Charles at LGF for visually demonstrating what thousands of people in the graphic arts business know to be true.
My first job as a teenager was in an inplant print shop. I had to create pasteup art and I had to typeset copy using an IBM Composer. Having been in the typesetting, printing, and graphic arts business for 35 years, I can assure you that the documents that Dan Rather and CBS used to vilify President Bush's guard service that look like they were typed in Word ARE ABSOLUTELY NOT FROM THE 70's. I did the exact same thing that Charles at Little Green Footballs did using Word and achieved the same results. If you didn't buy galley sheet type created with hot lead LinoType machines you used clunky mechanical typesetting equipment in the early 70's (IBM Selectrics and Composers). IBM Composers could force justify but did not have curved quotation marks or apostrophes on the IBM type balls and were awkward and time consuming to use. The media lamely attempts to say the Composer had proportional font spacing. Not really, the spacing was better than non-proportional spacing but far cruder than what computers do more precisely today. You could not accurately kern letters on the Composer. The Composers were also very expensive and not used as a casual correspondence typewriter. I would be extremely skeptical of anyone who claimed that the government provided Composers to any Guard unit just to type correspondence and memos. You typed on clay coat paper and used it as galley type for paste-up. You had to double type and use a manual dial system for spacing and kerning. Inch and footmarks had to do double duty. VERY expensive code-driven, proprietary equipment started coming on the scene in the late 70's that allowed you to do the proportional spacing and create superscripts more easily. However, this equipment (Itek, Addressograph/Multigraph, Compugraphic, etc.) was output to some kind of photographic paper or film output (because of the high resolution needed to make good type) and was NEVER used as a casual stand-alone word processor or typewriter for memos and correspondence. They were used to produce type to be printed. They were never coupled with a plain paper output device. Even with code-driven typesetters you still had to do a lot of manual work to get even close to what Word blindly does on a simple computer. Commercial typewriters DID NOT use proportional spacing and superscripts, especially those that would have been bought in bulk for the military. Don't let anyone convince you otherwise. Fonts can still be a tricky thing to use even today on Macs or PC's with Quark and Illustrator. There are so many versions of fonts and in the graphics business you have to be careful of reflow of type. To think Charles simply whipped out his version in no time at all! On default settings no less! When you add up all the specifics that others in the business have pointed out (superscripts, proportional spacing, kerning, Times New Roman, the "4" seemingly is unique to Times New Roman, auto-centering, etc., etc., etc.) Those of us in the business do not need a document expert to determine that Democrats and liberals are desperate enough to forge this stuff and then even blame the Republicans for setting the whole thing up. Rather is such a buffoon... Once again, the new media helps bring out the truth. A lot of credit goes to Charles at LGF for visually demonstrating what thousands of people in the graphic arts business know to be true.
posted by B0Z at 9/13/2004 05:54:00 PM
5 Comments:
Great post. Welcome to the blogging world. Kudos to have made it on to an LGF post. I am green with envy.
Thanks... The lizards at LGF rule!
You are right about the Composer, but wrong about the other phototypesetters, not that it matters -- the CBS "Killian" documents are forgeries.
I operated a then state of the art Mergenthaler VIP phototypesetter from 1971 to 1982. It shot light thought a rotating drum containing six strips of photographic negatives containing fonts. The light would then expose a portion of a strip of light sensitive paper.
Phototypesetters produced immaculately clear typeand were not were nearly as hard to use as the Selectric Composer. They did have c
(I may have posted a portion of this message by accidentally pressing a function key. Forgive me.)
You are right about the Composer, but wrong about phototypesetters, not that it matters -- the CBS "Killian" documents are forgeries.
I operated a then state of the art Mergenthaler VIP phototypesetter from 1971 to 1982. It shot light thought a rotating drum containing six strips of photographic negatives containing fonts. The light would then expose a portion of a strip of light sensitive paper.
Phototypesetters produced immaculately clear type and were not as hard to use as the Selectric Composer. They could switch between Roman and Italic type, for example, and a built in computer pruduced justification and centering, etc.
However, the paper phototypesetters used only lasted a few months before they faded to black.
Scott,
The Merg VIP was one of the phototypsetters I never worked on. I remember a forms house that had it and it seemed to be able to do some of the kerning, leading, etc. easier than the Iteks and Compugraphics could. My statement of "there are so many versions of fonts and in the graphics business you have to be careful of reflow of type" is probably not consistent with the phototypesetters since each letter on phototypesetter fonts was static. Type reflow became an issue when the Macs and digital output devices took over the market from the phototypesetters. I remember the film strip fonts on Compugraphics and the plastic pie wedge fonts on the Iteks. So nice catch, dude! This is what I love about the blogs. It's a great way to hold us as well as MSM accountable and broadens the base of discourse and and fact-finding by average guys like us.
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