Monday, September 13, 2004

A Forger Would Never Go Out of His Way to Do That!

CBS brought forward a new witness tonight, a fella named Richard Katz.

Katz, the software expert, pointed out that the documents have both the so-called "superscript" th (where the letters are slightly higher than the rest of the sentence, such as 6th ) and a regular-sized "th". That would be common on a typewriter, not a computer.

"There's one document from May 1972 that contains a normal "th" on the top. To produce that in Microsoft Word, you would have to go out of your way to type the letters and then turn the "th" setting off, or back up and then type it again," said Katz.

I confess to having no idea what Katz's point is here. Why would it be unusual to "go out of your way" to do this if you were working on a forgery? I've done this dozens of times: intentionally left a space between the number and the "th," and then backspaced in order to "trick" Microsoft from automatically creating a superscript. I just went onto Microsoft Word and did it again. It took about 3 seconds.

I'm afraid CBS is going to have to do better than this!