Outside the Perimeter: How to "trick" Microsoft Word

I was looking through the 60 Minutes documents and noticed something specific on the "Suspension of Flight Status" memo.

You can see that whoever was doing this was trying to get around Microsoft Word's feature of "AutoFormat As You Type" by not having Word automatically superscript the "st" after the number 9921 or automatically superscript the "th" after 147. This is something I have run into myself, and I have been using MS Word since version 1.0. (Note: From what I remember the Autoformat as You Type feature came out with the '97 version. Don't quote me on that - it is just my best recollection). Autoformat As You Type does things such as replacing straight quotes (as a typewriter would have done) with curly, what Microsoft calls "smart quotes", and changes dashes with hyphens.

Sometimes when you are working on a document, some of this stuff can drive you crazy. So you either have to know how to turn the feature off or know how to work around it. (Forgers: See my previous post for tips on how to do that.)

I assume that the person who made this document was not very knowledgeable about MS Word, because of how they got around the Autoformat As You Type feature:

First, where they typed in "147th" and "9921st" they left a space between the last number and the first letter. This way, Word would not Autoformat the word. You can see this here:

The cleverness (as opposed to the intelligence) of the forger occurred to me when I saw the letterhead and that they DID NOT do the same thing with the word "111th". In other words, they did not leave a space between the "111" and the "th". But somehow they still got around the AutoFormat as You Type.

How?

Simple, they did not type in the number "111" followed by the text "th". They typed in lowercase letter "L"s instead. In the Times New Roman font, lower case "L" and the number "1" look almost the same.

Since Word will only automatically superscript when a NUMBER is followed by "th", "st", etc., then the forger was able to get past the Autoformat as You Type feature. If you look carefully, you can see that the Times New Roman number "1" has a longer base than the lowercase letter "l". Other than that, they look very much the same.

It looks like the forger repeated the same technique to type in the word "1st" without having word automatically superscript the "st".

I think what the forger did was clever, for a MS Word amateur. He or she was able to figure out a way around AutoFormat as You Type. However, for an experienced Word user (I blush), it was very easy to figure out what he or she did and why.

Don't worry, though, forger! I plan on working on more tips for Democratic forgers (see previous post)so you can do a better job next time. Keep your eyes open for that update.

Update: Here is my better forgery. I typed in up in Word, using the font "Courier New", a monospaced font. I made a screen shot of the document in Print Preview, and then pasted the picture in Microsoft Image Composer and save part of the picutre as a jpeg. I then opened the jpeg in Microsoft Picture It! 9 and applied the "Photocopy" and then the "Old Paper" filter. It took me about 10 minutes, and I think it looks better than the amatuer version that 60 minutes used:

Click for a Larger View.

Hey Dems! The next time you need a document forged, send me an email. I can offer you a reasonable price and the public would probably believe it at least a couple of days longer than your version.

Comments

I enjoyed your article, but Im afraid that I must disagree with you. In all of the "memos" the number ones are really typed as number ones.

In Microsoft Word, the spacing between number 1s is fixed, at the same spacing as all other numbers, such that they line up when making columns of numbers. The letter l spacing is not fixed, since it is just another letter. Since the letter l is so thin, it has a very small spacing and tends to look like it is practically adjacent to other letters, especially next to other letter ls.

Unsurprisingly, the exact same phenomenon is seen in the memos produced by CBS. Look at the memos printed here and see for yourself:

usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-09-09bushdocs.pdf

First, let us look at the second memo at this site dated 04 May 1972. There are three separate spots where three number 1s are adjacent (111). One is in the header, one is in paragraph one, and one is in paragraph two. Notice how all the number ones are spaced out from each other. Now compare this to the word Ellington, in paragraph one. Notice that the letter l’s are practically on top of each other. Notice how close they are to the adjacent letters E and i. You can see this phenomenon in all of the letter l’s in the paragraph. The spacing between the letter l’s and its neighbors is minimal. The spacing between all of the number ones and their neighbors is significant. And of course, the spacing in all of these examples matches what Word does exactly with number ones and letter ls. What a coincidence

The number ones in question in the piece are contained in the memo dated 18 August 1973, the last memo at the previously mentioned site, the one that Charles overlaid. They highlight the number 1 in 1973 and the letter l in Alabama. But notice how close the letter l in Alabama is to its neighbors. Notice how far away the number 1 is from its neighbors in 1973. Unfortunately, there are no adjacent number ones in this memo, but there are adjacent letter l’s. Look at the word “all” at the end of the first paragraph and the word “I’ll” at the end of the second paragraph. Look how close together the letter l’s are. Look how close the letter l’s are to their other neighbors. Now look how all of the number 1’s are spaced from their neighbors. Look at how far apart the 1 is from the 8 in 17 and 187, and how far the 1 is from the 9 in 1973.

Of course, coincidentally, all of this spacing matches exactly what Microsoft Word does.

So, there are two possibilities, as I see it.
1) These memos were typed on typewriters too ancient to have a separate number one key, so number ones had to be typed as letter ls. However, the same typewriter is so sophisticated that it knows what the typist is thinking and gives proper spacing to the letter l depending on whether you meant to type a letter l or a number 1.
2) These memos are poor forgeries typed in Microsoft Word.

Hmmmm. Looks like there isn’t any way to figure this one out :-)

Posted by: Steven | September 14, 2004 at 10:47