In 2017, Gerald McGoey, a Canadian businessman, declared personal bankruptcy. The personal bankruptcy filing came years after his Ontario-based teleco

The Font Detectives

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2023-05-22 21:30:06

In 2017, Gerald McGoey, a Canadian businessman, declared personal bankruptcy. The personal bankruptcy filing came years after his Ontario-based telecommunications company had gone belly up. McGoey wanted to keep his stately vacation properties—a lakeside cottage in the Muskoka region of Ontario and a hobby farm—and produced documents showing that both were held in trust for his children.

Something seemed amiss. The lawyers called in Thomas Phinney, who has dubbed himself The Font Detective. “A font can tell you a lot of things, depending on the circumstances,” the Portland-based typography expert told me. Phinney is also the CEO of FontLab, which offers font creation software.

Phinney quickly found a way to call McGoey out. The document putting the cottage in trust was allegedly signed and dated in 1995. But it was printed in Cambria, a Microsoft serif font that came out to the public in 2007. Phinney also saw that the document regarding the farm was written in sans serif Calibri, which also saw widespread release in 2007. But the document supposedly was dated and signed in 2004. Even if, by strange happenstance, McGoey had buddies at Microsoft and got access to the font while it was still in development, designers changed Calibri’s numbers in 2005. His document included the newer version of the digits.