Charles Johnson's image comparing what CBS claimed was a 1973-era typewritten memo with a 2004-era Microsoft Word document, made with default settings using Times. (From Wikimedia)

Wow. I can’t believe it. Dan Rather in a recent CNN interview isn’t just saying that they did the best they could with what they knew at the time, but also claiming that the Bush National Guard memos have never been debunked: ”the longer we go and nobody comes forward with proof that the documents were not what they report to be, the more I believe it.” He also said that ”those who found the story uncomfortable for their partisan political purposes attacked us at what they knew to be the weakest point, which was the documents.”

So Rather is zero for two statements there.

First, it’s clear that opinions among actual relevant experts are mostly restricted to the range from “can’t tell with the information I have,” to “the documents are clearly forgeries.” I have an MS in printing, have worked as a font and typography geek since the 90s, and I’ve testified as an expert witness in this area in court, so I include myself as somebody with relevant expertise.

I’ve given my analysis of the Killian/Bush documents in an interview and article on CreativePro.com. I have also presented this analysis repeatedly, starting with the conference at the St Bride Printing Museum in London in 2004, and at the Justified West conference in Vancouver in 2009, and at a talk for The Type Directors Club in New York City this past January.  I got plenty of questions and discussion, especially at the St Bride conference, but in the end, nobody disputed my analysis at any of these presentations. That’s in front of audiences including literally scores of expert typographers. On average, they probably tend towards the left politically, so you should expect them to not like my conclusions and challenge them.

I believe I have clearly and specifically disproven the specific devices that were initially frequently cited as possibly used for the memos, the IBM Executive proportional typewriter, and the IBM Selectric Composer, which latter was pretty much a low-end typesetting machine.

Also, any typographers in the audience who were skeptical should have been encouraged by me offering $1,000 in cash out of my own pocket (an offer which I have repeated since, and hereby reiterate today) to anybody who could produce a device that:

• can replicate the line endings of the memos
• was available when the memos were supposedly written circa 1973
• is not an actual zillion-dollar typesetting machine (not a Linotype or Monotype typesetter, for example)

Nobody has so much as proposed a device, presumably because it doesn’t exist. It’s been eight years.

The last loud defender of the memos who claims some expertise is Dr David Hailey. With his unique access to higher-res scans of the memos from former CBS produceer Mary Mapes (who did not return my emails requesting such access, btw), he proved that they were not printed using Times New Roman, as some had claimed. What he didn’t realize at the time was that he had in fact proved that they were printed in Times Roman, the near-twin of Times New Roman. See my comparison of the two fonts. In private correspondence since, he has conceded that Times Roman is plausible, and further that the memos are likely forgeries produced on a later model typewriter. He still believes that they were typed, because he believes the irregular degradations in letter shapes were consistent with typing. I just take it as consistent with a combination of photocopying and faxing, but that’s not critical to my argument. Hailey is not arguing that some typewriter available at the time could have produced the memos, and that’s what would be needed for the memos to be authentic.

This rebuts Rather’s statement that the memos have never been debunked. There’s tons of evidence against them, and nobody can point to a device that could have produced them.

Now as to Rather’s assertion that those who attacked the memos did so for partisan political purposes, there are only two problems.

First, it’s what logicians call an “ad hominem” attack. Instead of attacking the argument, attack the messenger or their motives. The only problem is, that tells you nothing about whether the argument is true or false. So it’s just bad form.

More importantly, the suggestion that all those attacking the memos were right-wing partisans is simply untrue. I don’t usually talk about my political views here, but for once it’s relevant to my typographic views. So here goes.

I’m a flaming liberal in most people’s books. I donated money to the Democratic presidential candidate opposing George W. Bush in both of Bush’s elections. I don’t want to put into words the strength of my dislike of the former President and most of his policies (though there are a few things he did that I agreed with). When I was a kid growing up in Canada, even the Conservative party was to the left of the US Democratic party. My problem with Obamacare is that it doesn’t go far enough.

So I don’t like Bush, okay? But that doesn’t make the documents authentic. By the way, it’s not hard to find other liberal experts whose analysis of the documents is that they are fakes. For example, this fellow. So, no, not everyone attacking the authenticity of the memos is some right-wing ideologue.

Dan Rather’s inability to admit having made a mistake is getting a little old after almost eight years.

General

About the Position

I’m located in Portland, Oregon. Helpful if you are too, or willing to relocate for the summer.

I’m open to negotiation, but as a starting point, I envision this position as roughly equal parts of the following areas of work:

• Helping me with font production on Cristoforo (in process) and especially Cristoforo Italic (not even started). There is room for some actual type design here.
• Helping create and deliver the rewards for the Cristoforo Kickstarter project (t-shirt, 3 postcards, 3 desktop designs; taking the lead on design, if possible)
• Reading suggested books from my substantial library on typography and type design. Expect to read at least one book every week, more if possible.
• Working on your own type design project(s) much as you would if you were doing a University course
• Receiving direct type design instruction as well as detailed and constructive feedback and critiques from me on your work, both on your own type design project and your help on Cristoforo

Requirements:

• Obsessive, detail-oriented personality
• Strong ability to follow through and finish lengthy projects
• Comfortable and able to both work substantially independently (for your own type design) and with considerable guidance/interference/supervision (on Cristoforo and possibly on the Kickstarter rewards).
• Some background in typography and graphic design
• Quick learner
• Very good English reading skills or ability to put in extra hours to make up for it
• Fair spoken English communication skills
• Solid computer skills. I am happy to teach type design and font production, but you need to be good on a computer already
• Either bring your own laptop or be happy working on Windows
• Be really sharp—brainpower is good.
• Able to work evenings and especially weekends. That’s when I’m free—though much work could also be done during weekdays when I’m busy at my day job. I am not talking about working more than 40 hours a week, it is a question of when we meet and work together.

Highly Desirable:

• Able to relocate to Portland, at least for the summer. If not, we’d be doing a bunch of work by Skype and email and such. But a local candidate would be preferred.
• Substantial graphic design skill/experience, able to take the lead in designing the poster, t-shirt, desktop designs and postcards called  for by the Kickstarter project. BFA or equivalent would be great.
• Do not require a special visa to work in the USA, or are willing to work for free. I am not inclined to deal with US visa/immigration bureaucracy unless you are an extraordinary candidate (in which case you ought to be getting paid more than I can afford to pay you!)

Bonus Points For:

• Quite comfortable with both Mac and Windows. I go both ways
• Have your own laptop to bring with you
• Have done noticeable reading or have real experience relating to type design
• Have some familiarity with FontLab Studio or other font development software (CorelDraw does not count)
• Experience with screen printing and/or letterpress printing
• Being a geeky intellectual type

Next Steps:

Submit a resume, write-up, or whatever you like. References appreciated! Samples of, or links to, your previous work would be great, especially anything that shows your attention to detail and ability to complete long projects. Indicate whether you are available for an in-person interview. I visited Rochester NY in late April and Seattle WA in early May, but don’t anticipate traveling again before I make a decision.

My email address is tphinney and the domain is cal.berkeley.edu.

Yes, I’m starting a Kickstarter campaign to find backers for my new typeface, Cristoforo, a revival of some classic Victorian typefaces by Hermann Ihlenburg. It’s also known as the typeface of Call of Cthulhu (the H.P. Lovecraft roleplaying game), and as the original logo for Cracker Jack. The campaign will only last until midnight on Saturday May 19, which is 26 days from now. Basically, people pledge money up front for the fonts (and other goodies) so I know the project is viable. Reward options for backers depend on their funding level, and include not only the fonts, but computer desktop wallpaper, postcards, T-shirts and posters.

Kickstarter is all or nothing. Only if the total pledges exceed the minimum funding target are people’s credit cards charged and the project moves forward.

If funding exceeds the minimum by enough of a margin, I can add more language support for central/eastern Europe (including Cyrillic), and even pay an intern!

Check it out!

American Italic 2 med res

American Italic 1 med res

As mentioned previously, I’m working on a revival of the Hermann Ihlenburg typeface Columbus (1892, MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan / American Type Founders), under the name Cristoforo. But now I’m looking for samples of its differently-named italic companion, American Italic (Hermann Ihlenburg, American Type Founders, 1902). I have two from the ATF 1906 specimen book, shown at right. But neither shows a complete character set at a reasonable size. If anyone has the actual metal typeface, especially in a medium to large size, I would love to get a full specimen. Or, if you have a printed sample showing all or most characters at a largish size, that would also be great!

[Update April 21/22: Just got some great pics from Jackson Cavanaugh (Okay Type), showing the relevant pages from the ATF 1899, 1900, and 1903 specimen books! Amelia Hugill-Fontanel at the Cary Library is also digging into it. I am still thinking about scans, but the pics are a fab start. I am already in good shape for Columbus Initials, the swash caps font. I'd love to hear from anybody who has metal type for any of these faces!]

Columbus charset showing

I’m already in decent shape for a sample of the upright version of Columbus, unless it turns out the full typeface has more characters?

Click on any image for a larger version.

Watch this space for news on the related Kickstarter campaign coming in a few days! Get in touch if you would like a sneak preview.  [UPDATE 23 April 2012: I am now funding development of this typeface on Kickstarter! Deadline is May 19.]

Sometimes printing a PDF is legal, but making a really pretty book might not be.

I just want to make pretty hand-made hardcover books, like these I did years ago:

Some of my hand-bound hardcovers

Using real sewn signatures like these:

Sewn signatures ready to bind into a hardcover book (click to enlarge)

Without becoming a criminal.

I’m trying to make some one-off fancy hardcover books from some PDFs I have. Unfortunately, doing so may often be illegal, even when printing the document to make a less nicely bound book would be legal.

“What the heck,” you say? Well, here’s the thing….

Making a really high end hardcover from a document such as a PDF involves rearranging the pages (“imposition”) in order to print them in sets on sheets with more than one page per side, so that you can fold them and sew them in groups (“signatures”).

Commercial e-books sold as PDFs are often encrypted with flags on the PDF permit printing, but not modification. Nor do they permit “document assembly” which is exactly what I need: the ability to rearrange, add and delete pages in the PDF. Unfortunately, common approaches to doing imposition involve generating a modified PDF: one in which the pages are at least rearranged and put more than one to a (now larger) page. So far, it looks like many (perhaps all?) imposition apps do it this way and don’t work with PDFs that have restrictions on modification (perhaps on PDFs that have *any* access restrictions?).

Now, I can easily break the encryption on a PDF, if that PDF allows opening but just has restrictions on specific uses like modification. If I do that, I can then use imposition software on a PDF that allows printing but not modification, and make a fancy book.

But (at least as I understand it, and admittedly I’m not a lawyer) the Digital Millenium Copyright Act says that circumventing an access restriction is always illegal, regardless of why I do it. That makes me a criminal if I do that, even if for the sole reason of making a pretty hardcover book. Even when printing the pages out normally and slapping glue on the spine, like a typical softcover “perfect-bound” book, is permitted and legal.

(Perhaps a lawyer could successfully argue that the flags on PDFs that allow some uses but not others are guidance, rather than effective technological measures creating access restrictions? That is, unlike encryption of the entire PDF with a password needed to open it. That argument worked for Adobe v Monotype over the embedding flags in fonts. But I have neither the interest nor the deep pockets needed to fund making that argument in court.)

[Update: As seen in the comments on this post in the first 18 hours, the legal situation is more complicated and more uncertain than I thought. Fair use may indeed offer a defense. Given the uncertainty, and my desire to stay on the right side of both copyright law and the DMCA, my behavior is not going to change much with this knowledge, though it is comforting.]

Why are PDFs set this way in the first place?

So I was wondering, “why do publishers use the particular combo of settings they do, that is bugging me?” It turns out the answer is “because that’s the only reasonable option Adobe makes easily available to them.”

Although the PDF format allows for very granular permissions settings, the Acrobat Pro and InDesign UIs do not. They give the choice of “no protection” or one of four option combinations, which determine the settings of the 10 different permissions.

Options Adobe presents for PDF security

Most publishers of commercial PDFs are going to want to allow commenting, and disallow document modifications. That gives them exactly one choice, which also disallows “document assembly.”

The common choice for security

Nobody is going to go for the “everything but page extraction” option:

Option for "everything but page extraction"

… and short of that, allowing document assembly disallows commenting, for some reason I don’t understand! Perhaps Adobe thought that this would only be used by books going to a professional high-end print production house, who would not need to stick comments on the PDF? Teh broken.

The standard combination that allows "document assembly"

Of course the use case for comments in general is much broader than for imposition, so publishers quite reasonably pick the option that is bugging me.

I see there are third party tools that do allow such granular option choices (e.g. Nitro PDF), but of course they are not so widely used.

Solutions?

Ideally Adobe would change their content creation and Acrobat Pro applications to allow more granular settings of the 10 different functionality permissions in PDFs, without forcing content creators to resort to specialized apps.

We could also fix this by changing the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). I gather circumventing an access control mechanism is always illegal unless a specific exemption is carved out for that use. Allowing an affirmative defense for cases where the access control mechanism is circumvented to enable functionality which is either generally allowed by the licensor, or allowed by fair use, would be cool. I’m sure it won’t happen, though, and it would be a long wait.

What else can I do?

I can go to the copyright holders and ask their permission to break the encryption on their PDFs for the purposes of making a fancy book from each, for my personal use. Getting the permission of the copyright holder gets one off the hook for DMCA violation.

(I would also consider it okay to sell such a book to somebody else, if that third party could prove to me that they had licensed the printable PDF as well. But that isn’t my intent in making the books, I really just have personal use in mind.)

I have in fact been doing this, with good luck to date. Kind of a pain to track them down, but authors so far have been really great. They say sure, I can break the encryption on my PDFs for this specific purpose. I guess they quite rightly figure that if I were an evil hacker I wouldn’t be asking nicely about something that I can do easily enough without permission.

Printing Books?

Hey, I love e-books. I read more than I used to thanks to e-books and my Kindle. But there are some books that for various reasons I would like to have a really nice physical hard copy of. Some of these I have already licensed as a PDF, and that PDF and the license allows me to print it out. So I’d like to do that, and not end up breaking the law just because I want to make a really nice book out of it, not just pages stuck together with glue, like a paperback.

More About Signatures

A “signature” is a group of sheets of paper, folded in half, which can then be stitched through the spine of the group (the fold), and also stitched to the other signatures. In traditional offset printing the signature usually starts out as a single huge sheet, folded repeatedly, and trimmed so that the pages are only linked at the spine at not at top and bottom. But if you want to make a fancy book from a PDF, you could just use pages twice the size of the pages of the original PDF document, folded in the middle, to make four pages per sheet. As almost all my originals were 8 1/2″ x 11″, and I have a printer capable printing 11″ x 17″ pages, double-sided, I decided to do that.

Books using sewn signatures instead of glue alone are much sturdier and more resistant to pages coming loose. If the sewn signatures are also sewn to thick cloth tapes which attach to the covers, the book can be extra resistant to the entire book block coming loose from the binding as well. This is the style of binding I am doing in current projects.

More About Imposition

Now, the interesting thing about signatures is that it complicates the positions of your pages. To understand what I mean, try taking three sheets of paper in a stack. Fold the whole set in half to make a booklet. Now start numbering the top right corner of each page. You’ve got 12 numbers.

When you take the stack apart, the first sheet has page 1 on the right half and page 12 on the left. and on the other side it’s pages 2 and 11. Let’s call it 12-1/2-11. The next sheet is 10-3/4-9, and the final sheet is 8-5/6-7. In a full on book there would be multiple signatures, each starting in this kind of sequence. So if I’m printing 8.5×11 pages on 11×17 sheets, I need to rearrange the original pages, and put more than one on each side of a sheet, to get the right pages on the right sheets. Add in possibilities like throwing in some blank or unnumbered pages at the beginning, and multiple signatures, and it can get quite complicated.

Luckily this is an old and fairly well-understood printers’ problem. It’s called “imposition,” which is the art of figuring out which page numbers go where. Of course, in serious offset printing a single sheet might be folded a bunch of times before cutting it apart… that’s really complicated! So there’s imposition software that sorts this out for us. The one I’ve heard the most about is called Quite Imposing and deals with the complexities faced by printers putting many pages on a sheet, among other things. It’s a plug-in to Adobe Acrobat. But it costs $475 USD.

However, for my purposes I only need two pages on each side of the sheet. For that use, I found the amusingly named Cheap Impostor software does everything I need for a fraction of the price of the high end applications. It’s only $35, and it’s shareware so you can try before you buy. I’ve already pumped over a thousand pages through it. The author was quite responsive for tech support, as well. Highly recommended.

• Part 1: Selecting Fonts. Wed Sep 7, 11 am PST
• Part 2: Setting Text, Wed Sep 21, 11 am PST
• Part 3: The New Frontier—OpenType typography on the Web, Wed Oct 5, 11 am PST

Read all the details on the WebINK blog. Or just register now.

Here are the results of my little survey. There have been over 300 responses. It’s certainly not a random sample, mostly people deeply involved with typography in some way. Interestingly, the results didn’t really vary by expertise level. (The order of the possible answers was randomly varied so as not to influence the answers, btw.)

• “sans serif” 68%
• “sans-serif” 27%
• “sanserif” 2%
• other 3%

The most common comments under “other” were that it should be “sans serif” as a noun and “sans-serif” as an adjective (for example, “a sans-serif typeface”). Certainly if the noun form is “sans serif” then standard English usage would dictate that the compound adjective would be hyphenated.

Another common response was that “sans” is an acceptable informal shorthand for “sans serif.”

Finally, it seems that despite a bit of solid support in the UK for “sanserif,” that spelling is neither particularly widely used nor accepted. The Oxford English Dictionary accepts it and dates it back to 1830, and the Oxford University Press, Robert Bringhurst (The Elements of Typographic Style) and eminent professors James Mosley and Michael Twyman all use it, as does typographer and typography author Robin Kinross. I must confess to not much liking “sanserif” myself.

[Edited to correct spelling of "Mosley" and add a little more detail on "sanserif," and again to add Bringhurst the to list of "sanserif" supporters.]

Specimen — click for higher-res sample

Ihlenburg is pretty darn obscure, btw. He had the misfortune to be prolific back in the late 19th century, when type designers got very little recognition, and typefaces were just starting to be given unique names. The main available info about him is in a 1993 article David Pankow wrote about Ihlenburg for the American Printing History Association’s journal, on the occasion of an archive of Ihlenberg material being assimilated by the Cary library at RIT (Pankow was then curator of the Cary, and editor of the APHA journal).

Fast forward almost 20 years to 2010-11. While unpacking some boxes, I ran into some photocopies I had made of some good quality type specimens of Columbus, from early ATF specimen books. This was handy, because the earliest ATF book I have is about 1906, and the design had already been dropped by then. A quick search online verified that nobody had done a decent digital version yet. There’s a free version called by its original name, Columbus, by a fellow named Sam Wang, and an $18 commercial font called Beaumarchais from Scriptorium that is particularly awful, worse then the free font. Each has about 100 glyphs.

So I’ve been working on and off on doing a better version from digitized scans. It’s not “done” exactly, but it is already a whole lot better than either of the other versions currently available. I’m still tuning spacing and additional glyphs. I plan about 260 total glyphs, of which about 106 are in good shape right now, including alternate swash caps, which were not done in the previous digital revivals. I am using my old typeface as a placeholder and replacing glyphs as I fix them up.

I did a little bit of work on this font during the type busking at TypeCon New Orleans, and got some good feedback on the eszett and the spacing while I was there (thanks to Gary Munch et al).

I can’t call it Columbus, however: ATF’s trademark lapsed, and Monotype trademarked the same name for a 1992 Patricia Saunders typeface (celebrating the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ famous arrival, while Ihlenburg’s typeface was so named for the 400th anniversary). My previous attempt had for a while been called “Columbine” but that has taken some unfortunate connotations, so for now I’m calling it “Cristoforo,” after the sailor’s first name.

I’m still not sure what I’ll do with it. For now I am licensing it on special one-off terms to a very small handful of companies doing material related to the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game. Maybe I’ll do a commercial release at some point, who knows?

Here are samples of my work-in-progress and its nominal competitors. I’ll leave telling which is which as an exercise for the viewer—make your guess before you hover your cursor over the images, or read the comments.

\

Amazon Kindle

Now, of course this is just Amazon and not all retailers, and it’s unit sales rather than dollars, but then again, these figures do not include ebooks Amazon “sells” for free, either. However you slice it, it is still a major milestone. Unlike PC Magazine’s John C Dvorak, I do generally believe the numbers, but unlike Mr Dvorak I also see Kindles on every flight I take, and every bus I ride to and from work. Dvorak makes a big deal of the possibility much of this content is being read on other devices besides Kindles per se, which (as I said last summer) misses the point. The Kindle is good for Amazon because Kindle users are locked into Amazon’s (Kindle-branded) ebook sales, but as long as people buy the Kindle ebooks from Amazon, it’s no skin off Amazon’s nose what device they get read on. The profits are on the content sale, not the reading devices.

I rather expect that retail books as a whole will pass this milestone some time in 2012. We are living in the proverbial interesting times.

The Economist:

• digital-only subscription $110 for one year
• paper plus digital $127 for one year, $223 for two years
• special offer: paper plus digital for $51 for one year

New York Times:

• paper plus digital: $7.40/week, $384.80 per year
• digital only: $8.75/week for same level of digital access as a paper subscriber, $455 per year

Time magazine:

• $30/yr paper
• $36/yr Kindle (without graphics and photos)

Why the craziness? These publishers want me to pay more for the electronic version than the printed one, even though their marginal costs are lower. Publishers are so worried about protecting their paper publishing business that they are hobbling the digital one in ways that make no sense in terms of their overall business and especially in terms of their future.

I didn’t just look up publications that happen to be crazy. The first two are publications I like and enjoy reading and would like to subscribe to. I don’t want the printed versions, which pile up in my home and use up resources for insufficient value (to me, anyway). I want to get the digital versions. I am perfectly willing to pay a “fair” price. Time was the first other big periodical that came to mind, and did not surprise me in having an equally crazed pricing model.

But these sorts of pricing decisions just piss me off, and leave me feeling that the publishers are trying to use digital-only revenue to prop up their failing paper-based businesses. As a would-be digital-only subscriber, I feel exploited. Or I would if I actually gave them my money… which I won’t do under these conditions.

End result of this kind of pricing? Those who continue it will find their market share eaten by those who don’t make that mistake. They will find competitors who either are perfectly willing to let their digital business take over some of their print business, or just don’t have a printed paper business to worry about.

Just as I finished writing this piece, I found an article that sums up the problem nicely:

http://www.betatales.com/2011/04/24/the-word-that-should-be-banned-in-all-media-companies/

Print media businesses are so worried about cannibalization that they are shooting themselves in their heads. I hope it stops before we lose some fine publications, or they become shadows of their former selves.

NOTES:

Yes, I call them “print media businesses,” because that is how they are behaving: at some level they have not figured out that they need to become simply “media businesses.”

Yes, I’m omitting some details and extra options. For exmaple, the NY Times offers a discount on the first two months of digital, and cheaper digital-only options are available from NYT as well, but those offer trimmed-down access choices instead of allowing people access from whatever device they want. Still, the all-digital version that is equivalent to the digital options the print subscriber gets is more expensive, as best as I can tell. Without getting the paper copy, whose price includes home delivery.

Finally, I kept on looking, and sure enough, there are publications that have sane policies in this area. For example:

Seattle Times:

• $5.60/wk paper
• $1.99/wk digital

I’m voting with my pocketbook.