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« Will Calibri leave Pakistan sans Sharif?

Calibri font samples

Luc[as] de Groot’s Calibri, which entered wide use in 2007.

Update 26 Feb 2018: The Calibri cases just keep coming, fast and furious. I have done many hours of research since I wrote this, and now understand far too much for anyone’s sanity regarding the details of Calibri’s availability during its development. Besides past cases, I am currently consulting on three court cases about this, including providing assistance to another expert.

I answered a question on Quora early last week about the availability of Microsoft system font Calibri before its official release in 2007, and quickly found myself caught in a maelstrom centered on the family of the Prime Minister of Pakistan. I have now been interviewed by both the BBC and NPR about the case, and quoted in various other places. Sensibly enough, one publication got feedback from Luc[as] de Groot, the designer of Calibri.

Pakistan has seen a high-​level corruption inquiry based on the Panama Papers leaks last year, that incriminated many public figures. Several of the Pakistani PM’s children appear to have investments in offshore companies. The question is, who owned the investments? The PM’s daughter Maryam Nawaz Sharif (who purportedly has political ambitions) produced a document that purported to prove that she was a “trustee” while her less-​politically-​interested brother was the owner.

The document had a date of early February 2006, and was set in Calibri, although that typeface wasn’t formally released until January 2007.

As my writeup on Quora explains, Calibri was available in “preview” versions of what would become Windows Vista as early as 2004. But normal people were not using this for office documents before it came out in 2007. One can debate whether it qualifies as a “smoking gun,” but it is at least highly suspicious, and I have no inclination to argue that the Pakistani Supreme Court is being unreasonable to say that the burden of proof is now on the defense to explain this improbable situation.

I have testified in court about a backdated document using Calibri before—although in a clearer case where the document was dated prior to even 2004. I am pretty sure that I will again—plenty of people will not remember or hear about this case, so being the default font in both Word and Excel it will come up again in future forgeries.

3 commentsto “Will Calibri leave Pakistan sans Sharif?”

  • July 19, 2017
    Zarrar wrote

    I have heard that there was some issue with printing calibri font in the initial days..

    Is there any conclusive evidence that this font could not be used to print a document in the grey period (from 2004 to 2007)?

  • May 7, 2018
    fatih bolat wrote

    Hello Sir,

    I would like to learn that, was it possible to use special Turkish charahters with calibri (like Ğ,ğ) before 2007. Turkish characters added on calibri on first day of release calibri or not?
    On the other hand ı have one more question,
    when ı write a paraghraph with using calibri 1.02 and 5.62 or other versions, sizes of paragrafhs are different. these two different versions do not fix each other %100. Do you think each version of calibri has got small differences to define the version? if we can define the version , we can tell the date of writing maybe?

  • May 18, 2018
    Thomas Phinney wrote

    Turkish characters (more broadly, extended Latin, Greek and Cyrillic) were added early in the development of Calibri, long before its primary release. From my archive, I see that the pre-​release versions 0.95 of Calibri, included with Windows Vista build 5112 (the first build to actually be called Windows Vista instead of “Longhorn”), already has the Turkish characters, way back in July 2005.

    I am not sure precisely what you mean by “sizes of paragraphs”—I am wondering if you are thinking/​finding the line spacing is different? Or are you seeing a change in where the line breaks occur? With further research I could probably make a more educated guess, but it’s much simpler to just ask.

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