How This Single 'M' Almost Ruined a US Presidency

Video written by Ben Doyle

[spookyghostwriter]

Fun fact: A Canadian soldier doing janitor work during the Quebec conference stumbled upon D-Day plans a year in advance. A world leader (he took exactly who it was to the grave) had left behind said plans sitting on a desk.

He took the documents home because it looked cool, took one look at exactly what he had snatched, and turned himself in the next day, earning himself several interviews with the FBI and Scotland Yard, but also a medal once things settled down.

[GeorgiaOverdrive]

The man forging the diaries actually did know that he used a gothic F instead of an A, he simply did not have a gothic A and just used an F hoping no one would notice.

[cassiemyersconcertvids]

Can't believe you didn't have your writer Amy forge federal documents for this video.

[altarancho]

As a tree risk assessor, I feel a kinship with font detectives. We’re both a highly specialized highly niche skillset that do heroic things extremely rarely. The rest of the time we’re weird and useless.

[veroxid]

6:30 The term in question is called "kerning." It's also the most tedious part of creating a font because not only do each glyph have a certain amount of spacing, but some character pairings need specific kerning pairings.

An example that is commonly missed in free fonts is the glyph "1" which requires a smidge more spacing if it comes after a letter like "d" or "T" than "a" or "n." If you tried to use consistent kerning spacing your "a1" will end up looking like "a 1" or your "d1" will end up looking like "oH" _(not quite but close enough)._
Probably the most famous pair is "WA."

[votekyle]

7:25 that is fired CBS journalist Dan Rather, not Jerry Killian. Rather’s career was injured permanently by publishing the story without verifying it throughly.

[CatherineKimport]

Suggesting we didn't notice the """so subtle""" switch to Aptos is like suggesting we wouldn't notice if you replaced the trumpets in an orchestra with a car horn

[joe_z]

5:59 Times New Roman is an inherently proportional typeface. There's no monospaced version of Times New Roman, and if there were, it would be blindingly obvious which one was being used because all the characters would be the same width in the monospaced version. Also, proportional typewriters did exist, and were pretty popular in the 1970s. In terms of typewriter functionality alone, the superscript "th" at 7:17 was the only clear giveaway.

But more importantly, Times New Roman as a font was never available for typewriters. While some of the fonts on proportional typewriters were Roman-looking fonts (including an IBM lookalike called Press Roman), the only way you could have gotten _Times New Roman_ on a printed document back in 1973 would have been to typeset it like a newspaper or magazine would, which is too much work for a simple office document like that.

[FindersKeeperz]

*Opens a video on the letter M* 4 seconds in “Publish adolf Hitlers diaries…”

[BlankPictures-]

The hilarious part is this could have easily gone undetected if they had just committed to the bit and used a typewriter from the 1970s. Like, they're not that hard to find.

[xirfan]

Ben he said no more wingdings, didn't say anything about webdings though 5:41

[haleyhalcyon]

Everything Sam got wrong about the Killian Memos:

• *The typewritten documents that Sam claims are "TNR" are NOT Times New Roman.* As he himself explains later, Times New Roman is variable-width/proportional, while typewriter fonts are fixed-pitch/monospaced.
• As far as I know, *Times was never available on any typewriter c.1972 or ever.* One major brand that “used type balls”, the IBM Selectric (1961–), had lots of different fonts available, all of them were fixed-pitch. (I know it’s just a stock video, but no variable-width typewriters ever gained traction.)
• *He confuses the space TAKEN UP BY each letter and the space BETWEEN each letter.* “Adjusting the space between each letter” is called kerning, and while most proportional fonts have it while monospace fonts don't, some proportional fonts don't kern. The width OF each letter is called the advance width.
• *He doesn't know what the hell “TrueType” means.* PostScript, TrueType, OpenType, WOFF, and WOFF2 are font file formats, just like JPG and PNG are image formats. The things he says “TrueType fonts do” are NOT features of or exclusive to TrueType fonts. As said before, adjusting the space between letters like "fr" (a better example would have been “fe” in “interference”) is called kerning, and is a feature of (most) proportional fonts, not just TrueType fonts. The “curved apostrophes” are a feature of Microsoft Word (or whatever other word processor they used) that replaces the straight “typewriter quotes” that your keyboard usually types with the special Unicode characters that represent curly quotation marks and apostrophes. The raised “th” is a feature of Microsoft Word that automatically applies superscript formatting to ordinal endings “st”, “nd”, “rd”, and “th”. The centered header is a formatting feature of Microsoft Word, too. Neither of these are features of TrueType fonts.

F - see me after class

[VonGeggry]

Sounds like, How to do a good forgery: Use Paper, Ink, and the hardware from the time period of interest

[tagrotax]

Ive always signed my name in blue ink because itd be easier to tell if a document was a copy, but now copy machines scan color and Im sad

[Nova]

Ben emailing his scripts in wingdings is sending me

[YesNowGoAway]

There actually were typewriters that supported proportional typefaces!
One example using typeballs, like those mentioned at 6:10, was the IBM Selectric Composer introduced in 1966.
They were rare and phenomenally expensive, but they did exist, and there were typeballs with a Times Roman variant available for them.

[HedgehogSpeedSonic]

LMAO. I love the subtle "anyone this diligent about font detecting has weaponized autism, so dont try fooling them this is their life".

[Dukenukem]

The saddest part of this all is that there are people that would actually fall for those documents even when proven objectively forged. And you did not even pointed that typewriter would never do "block format" to unevenly space the written words to fill in the width of the paragraph.
You can actually set MS Word to produce texts that are nearly 1:1 to what mechanical or electronic typewriter would produce, but still you can not replicate numerous things that would be present in the real documents, your best bet is to aquire some actual documents written on the particular machine (and by the person you are forging) of the time and modify the font to impress slight deformities and inaccuracies that might be present on the physical machine and quirks of that person (mainly misspells or fatfingers that are glossed over on paper as your other option is to rewrite whole page). Sprinkle in a few atrifacts from scanning process and dont forget to remove the digital fingerprint in document (metadata) and actual physical fingerpint on the printer (yellow dots) and you will present a very solid "real deal" document.
Forging is definitely an art, and we are always glad to see people complementing it with "looks just like a real thing".

[mathieuDBilly]

**channel is called "Half as Interesting"**

**Covers an extremely interesting subject**

[simonmeadows]

When the default in Windows changed from Calibri to Aptos, believe me, I noticed. I am now directing my hate to Aptos and have spent some time changing all the default settings back to Calibri.