Is it just me or are many getting sick of bloggers accounting themselves experts in typography just because they can use Microsoft Word?
Seriously, the blog space is getting full of people stating with self-sppointed authority that the Bush Guard memos must be forgeries merely because they can knock off a fairly similar-looking document using Word’s standard Times New Roman font. Good for them. Do they know that this typeface has been available since the 1930s? that IBM typewriters have, for the past 50 years, been capable of proportional font sizing and superscript for common abbreviations (like ‘th’)?
The documents may well be fakes… but it’s nothing that can get settled using those particular litmus tests.
I suppose it comes down to what people know versus what they think they know. So you can use Word… fine. That doesn’t make you an expert. If things were that blindlingly easy my presence in Jersey City on 9/11/01 would make me an expert in terrorism and structural engineering. A lot of people out there need to grab a nice cup of STFU.