Tahoma Look Alike

[Uwe]

I have a loan document that was created in November 1991 by an attorney using an early PC. The computer is long gone and my attorney passed away in 2006. I think he was using some sort of business form software created for Apple. The type face in question is identical to Tahoma but Tahoma was not introduced until 1994. I'm told that Tahoma is a knock off of several other fonts that were in use decades ago and may have been created by Susan Kare or Adrian Frutiger. Can anyone confirm my suspicions or has anyone used that early business form software I am referring to? Your help is appreciated.

 

 

[George Thomas]

A higher resolution scan would be nice as well as one that shows more letters, such as a paragraph of type. There are a number of fonts that look like the one you show but more detail is necessary.

Also, I have a question for you: why did you duplicate your post from December 2016 in this forum, made under another user name? Also this is the same post as one on Typophile under still another name where there was more discussion about this.

[Uwe]

I'm relatively new to font forums and was just trying to gather information for my boss. I think he posted the same or similar question on Typophile. The poor resolution is due to a very old copy. We tried one of those font matcherator sites and it kept rejecting the size of our file.

I see your name quite often so you must be very good at what you do. Thanks for your help in tying to solve this mystery. 

[George Thomas]

Thanks for the explanation and the scan. However, the scan isn't of any use; it is a 100dpi bitmap. Please replace it with a 300dpi grayscale or RGB scan, preferably in a format other than .jpg, such as .tiff or .png. Two paragraphs of the document would be sufficient.

[Ralf Herrmann]

The file format isn’t the problem. JPG is fine for the web. But it looks like this is a scan of a fax (or a similar reproduction technique was used) which completely mangled the original character outlines. We would really need to see a scan of the original. 

I also wonder whether the claim that this is from 1991 is really accurate. It really looks like Tahoma. 

[Thomas Phinney]

Given that it is set ragged-right, that's quite enough resolution to determine whether it is a particular typeface. Just re-set the same text and see if the lines match up exactly the same from one line to the next.

I have used this method with great success in multiple cases of forged, backdated documents.

[Thomas Phinney]

Also, Tahoma and Verdana are closely related, but neither is a “knock off” of anything else. I would be curious to know the putative source of that incorrect information.