Oh wow, now this is something: A Microsoft font may have exposed corruption in Pakistan:

The Microsoft font Calibri is now a key piece of evidence in a corruption investigation surrounding Pakistan’s prime minister. Investigators noticed that documents handed over by the prime minister’s daughter, Maryam Nawaz Sharif, were typed up in the font Calibri. But the documents were dated from 2006 — and Calibri wasn’t widely available at that point, making a good case that they were forged.

I love everything about this, but mostly just the fact that there are people know and care enough about fonts of all things to be able to point things like this out. This is true digital forensics. I almost feel sorry for Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif! Not enough though to keep me from highlight this amazing snippet of peak journalism from Arstechnica’s slightly more detailed article Not for the first time, Microsoft’s fonts have caught out forgers:

Ultimately, the fallout of the corruption and cover-up is that Pakistan may soon, like Calibri itself, be sans-Sharif.

The article goes on to note that this hasn’t been the first time that fonts have been the demise of the mighty:

Other Word features have caught out forgers, too. The “Killian documents,” which claimed President George W. Bush was declared unfit for service during his time with the Air National Guard, purported to have been produced on a typewriter in 1973. However, those documents used proportional fonts and curly quotes, making it spectacularly unlikely that they were authentic. Standard 1973 vintage typewriters didn’t offer either proportional fonts or curly quotes, but 2004-vintage Microsoft Word did both.

But yeah, apparently there are indeed people that both know and care a lot about fonts, such as this guy who researched the market share of fonts used for memes. Peak Friday evening material.

This whole rabbit hole was enabled by the Hacker News discussion on Microsoft’s new Aptos font, aimed to replace Calibre as the default, which I only even clicked on because I thought they were referring to Calibre the ebook management software that I use.