Dr. Newcomer's updates strengthen opinion that Rathergate docs are bogus

One of my readers emailed me to point out that Dr. Joseph M. Newcomer, whose fabulous and very technical Ra^thergate document analysis I posted about on Sunday, has posted updates to his original article in which he's responded to various questioners and critics.  Topics more fully addressed in the updates include "kerning and pseudo-kerning," "cut-and-paste signatures," "varitypers," and CBS' latest claim (which I haven't seen directly yet) about lower-case Ls versus numeral-ones.

This is fun to watch, because it's a guy with unquestionable expertise and no political axe to grind who's dealing in real time with every technical argument being thrown against the wall by the few folks who continue to insist that the documents are genuine.  As he does so, those arguments just keep sliding down the wall, and his conclusions that the CBS News documents are bogus just become stronger and more persuasive.

Dr. Newcomer's server traffic is mushrooming, but at least for now you can access his original article with the clearly-marked updates here.

Update (Tues Sep 14 @ 2:30am):  When I took typing in junior high in about, oh, 1971 or so, I seem to recall being taught to use the lower-case L in lieu of a numeral one because our old manual typewriters didn't even have a numeral-one key; to do an exclamation point, we had to do a period-backspace-apostrophe.  Am I hallucinating this memory?  I know that lots of old-school typists had that habit ingrained in them — using a lower-case L for a numeral one — and remember that it caused some problems in the transition to computers and word processors because, for example, spreadsheets reacted poorly when trying to do calculations on strings in which an L had been used instead of a numeral one.  Does this suggest that our forger is age 40+?

Update (Tues Sep 14 @ 3:30am): Nope, wasn't my imagination.  Here's the machine I learned to type on, an Olympia Standard model SG manual, of which our school's typing class had about 30.  It dates back to the late 1950s or early 1960s.  You can barely make it out in this picture, but — there's no numeral one/exclamation point key.

Dr. Newcomer thinks the CBS News' "expert" is wrong in stating that a lower-case L was used for the numeral ones anyway.  He further notes that if the person creating the document had ingrained habits of an old-school typist to use a lower-case L in lieu of the numeral one, he'd also have ingrained habits of using a capital O instead of the numeral zero; yet the documents clearly use zeros instead of capital O's. 

But returning to the CBS News rationale:  Even if one assumes that the Ra^thergate documents do use lower-case Ls instead of numeral ones, how is that supposed to prove that the documents were created on a typewriter?  We're supposed to hypothesize that Col. Killean had a typewriter sufficiently modern to be able to do proportional spacing, but that didn't have a numeral one key?!?  That dog clearly won't hunt.  Regardless of whether he was typing on a modern computer keyboard, or a typewriter of any era later than about 1910, the drafter of the CBS News documents would have had an L key available to him and could have used it — perhaps by ingrained habit.

If lower-case Ls were used, that doesn't point to an old typewriter, it points to an old typist.

(By the way, if you want, you can still buy a 43-key portable typewriter that lacks a numeral-one/exclamation-point key from Hammacher Schlemmer.  Tell 'em Beldar sent ya.)