By Lou Dolinar
First of two articles
Updated Feb. 14, 2006

Every 10 years or so, I get a nice juicy scandal here on the computer how-to beat. My favorite was when Ollie North forgot that the "deleted" Iran-Contra memos on his Profs mainframe and his hard drive files were still there, subject to reconstruction by Senate investigators. It was a wonderful opportunity to discuss how the fate of the republic hinged on the technical details of how hard drives work and, incidentally, give lessons in retrieving lost data.

Well, this week we're going to look at font issues and computer type, courtesy of Dan Rather and the allegedly bogus, circa 1972, memos he used recently in a report on President George W. Bush's National Guard duty.

The CBS anchor has since admitted that those memos were less than adequately sourced. I, like about 5 million other Internet users, was reasonably sure a couple of hours after CBS published them on the Web, because the memos used now-ubiquitous proportional type, scarce outside print shops in 1972. I was convinced the next day, when a Web site known as Little Green Footballs demonstrated with on-screen graphics that, when the document was retyped in Microsoft Word, every character in the memos lined up
precisely. See http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=12615&only

That tore it. We don't worry about this anymore, but it is a specific characteristic of computer type that a given font will appear identical in all respects - size, horizontal spacing, vertical spacing, etc. - regardless of the device on which it is printed or displayed. This is known as device independence.

Device independence was the holy grail of typesetting for, oh, 500 years or so, and like a lot of little technological revolutions, it happened rather quietly in our lifetime, unbeknownst to anyone outside the fields of computers, graphics or publishing - even though we all benefit from it every day.

Device independence means, for example, that the page you see on screen looks almost exactly as it will appear when you print it out. It means you can buy a $50,000 typesetter from company A and be certain that the type on page proofs you print on a $2,000 laser printer will line up exactly the same. It also means that you can shop around for any computer and use it to drive any typesetter, mixing and matching for maximum cost efficiency. In the case of the Rather memos, it means that a memo typedusing MS Word and Times New Roman, printed on a laser printer, will look exactly like a memo typed on a Compaq and printed on a dot matrix printer in the same font. The odds of this occurring in 1972, before PC-based type existed, fall between astronomical and nonexistent.

Way back then, the sheer number of mechanical components in early photo typesetting gear - ratchets and levers and gears and belts and motors - made it darn near impossible to match typefaces on models within a given manufacturer's product line, let alone between manufacturers. So-called front-end systems, basically customized computer word processors, had to be uniquely programmed to match each output device. Fonts were physical images on film, custom tweaked to optimize output. Variations among brands were slight but visible.

When PCs arrived, what had been a hassle for professionals became a nightmare for amateurs. If you bought a C. Itoh Prowriter for your Kaypro II, you had to cross your fingers and hope that the authors of WordStar, SuperCalc and Dbase had been kind enough to include printer drivers for that specific printer. Each and every program needed a specific driver for each and every printer, and every printer looked a tad different.

This changed in 1984, when Apple teamed with Adobe, which borrowed something they called PostScript. The original Mac had taken a first step toward device independence, in that printer drivers became a function of the operating system. There was no need for separate drivers for each program. The end result still looked pretty awful, however.

Then along came Adobe PostScript, embedded in the Mac OS and in a little mini-computer that was part of Apple's first laser printer, the LaserWriter. PostScript was a system- level function, so any computer that talked PostScript could immediately interface with any printer that had a PostScript controller.

PostScript was device independent in another important respect, as well. The controller unit would be designed to allow the maximum resolution of the printing device. Thus, you could print the exact same document on a LaserWriter at 300 dots per inch, or on a Linotronic typesetter, also equipped with PostScript, at 1,200 dots per inch.

The rest, as they say, is history. As computers got more powerful and Microsoft aped the Mac with Windows, Apple fell out with Adobe and created its own type rendering system, TrueType, which it licensed to Microsoft in 1992. PostScript, since then, has become a high-end solution for professional typesetters and graphic artists, where TrueType is the mass market solution. While there are still some dedicated PostScript controllers on printers, by and large the TrueType system uses the computer's own processor to render type and pages. Thus you have a situation where each and every computer running Windows, TrueType, Times New Roman and comparable software, like Word, produces precisely the same output, regardless of the brand or price of the printer.

For anyone familiar with this history, the questionable documents were shown to be decisively fraudulent as soon as the TrueType match was made.

The other great irony here is that the monopoly status of so-called old print media for years rested, in large part, on its ability to afford those old, cranky, expensive, not terribly compatible typesetting systems and presses. That gear is no longer needed to create professional, credible type on dead trees - or on computer screens.

While the bloggers who brought down Dan Rather have obvious expertise and reach thanks to the World Wide Web, I have a hunch that we take them a bit more seriously because their Web sites and the type they use to convey their thoughts are every bit as beautifully rendered and produced as the ones of "professional" journalism.