More on the CBS documents. David Hailey, a professor at the University of Utah, claimed that he had proven that the documents must have been created on a typewriter. In a report distributed in .pdf format, he recreated the Bush memos then disected the fonts and proved that the typewritten version was a closer match to the memos than the Times Roman version.

All of this looked good for CBS and bad for Bush. Then someone took a close look at the recreated document - a real close look. He did a 400% zoom on the superscript and saw that it was sharp and clear while the surrounding letters were fuzzy. It turns out that the professor couldn't reproduce the superscript so he had typed "th" out and used Photoshop to reduce the characters and paste them into his document.

Given that small opening, the blogger comminity pounced. Within a few hours Hailey admitted that he had not actually typed the memo. He had downloaded a font based on typewriters and used that. Not mentioned is the fact that the typewriters that the font was based on are mono-spaced but the computer font is proportional.

So the professor used a proportional, computer generated font in a paper proving that the forged memos could not have been created by a computer. At best he proved that the forger also downloaded a typewriter font.

Just think how frustrated the forger must be - he downloaded a special font to make the forgeries look more convincing but everyone assumed that he used the Windows default font and he couldn't tell anyone without admitting the crime.

Wired is carrying a story about this although they left out all of the juicy parts.