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Pakistan

Calibri becomes the talk of the town on Twitter

Dunya News

Calibri is currently the top trend on Twitter in Pakistan

By Saad Syed

The JIT report submitted in the Supreme Court regarding the investigation into the corruption allegations has generated a new controversy that has put the Sharif family into a precarious position. The cause of this controversy is not a huge loophole in the documentary evidence provided to the court by the Sharif family, but something really minuscule that no one would have thought would create so much trouble.

One of the clauses of the Joint Investigation Team’s report to the Supreme Court caught the attention of everyone has gotten a lot of traction. This clause shed light on the fact that the documents provided by Maryam Nawaz from 2006 used the font Calibri, which, according to the report, was not commercially available before 2007.

Excerpt from the JIT report

The issue of the Calibri font has garnered a lot of debate. Seemingly the font was created in 2004 and commercially released in 2007. Both sides in the debate are using these facts to support their side of the argument. For one side, the fact that it was created in 2004 is enough proof of the fact that the documents were not forged. The other side is adamant that the documents were forged because of the fact that the font was commercially made available in 2007. The documents in question submitted by Maryam Nawaz were dated February 2nd, 2006.

The document in question. (Source: Maryam Nawaz Twitter)

The confusion regarding the font has apparently been made clearer with a report being published by Dawn.com, that attempts to clarify the history of the font. According to the report, Lieselotte Schäfer, a representative of the company that created the Calibri font, Lucasfonts, said that the font was designed in 2002, and the final source files were sent to Microsoft in 2004. According to Schafer’s statement, the first public beta versions were published in 2006, and ‘it is extremely unlikely that somebody copy fonts from a beta environment to use in official documents’.

The font was released in June 2006, according to Wikipedia, four months after the papers submitted by Maryam Nawaz are said to be dated. Moreover, according to Dawn.com’s report, LucasFont’s statement, only people with an ‘extra-ordinary interest in computers subscribe to their (beta versions) use’. Also, Office 2007 was the first product to officially use Calibri on a large scale and it was released to customers in November 2006 and to retailers in January 2007.

Meanwhile, Pakistanis have taken to Twitter to express their views on this Calibri fiasco. Apparently, a majority of the Twiterati are of the belief that the documents were forged and are engaged in witty tweets aimed at roasting the ruling family’s supposed blunder, with #Calibri being the top Twitter trend in Pakistan now.

One user commended Maryam Nawaz for ‘inventing’ the Calibri font

 

Another user pointed out how the JIT team should have been examiners

A user opined how the documents should have been typed with Arial, making a reference to the washing powder.

The Calibri issue was also compared to the Covfefe blunder

This user appreciated the JIT team’s highly inquisitive approach to the investigation

Anchorperson Sadaf Jabbar deemed the Sharif family was ahead of its time.

Someone also pointed out how Zardari might be handling the news

Another tweet showed a picture of Nawaz Sharif and Bill Gates, making an amusing reference to the Calibri issue

Meanwhile, the Wikipedia article on Calibri has suffered from repeated editing attempts. Of the last 50 editing attempts on the Wikipedia article, 39 were carried out after 10th July, 2017, the day the JIT report was submitted to the court and the issue came to the forefront.

Screengrab of the edit history of the Wikipedia article on Calibri.

Wikipedia has currently placed a hold on editing the article until 18th July until editing disputes have been resolved. Moreover, the article now also states, “In 2017, the font was used as evidence in a Pakistani government corruption case Panama Papers case (Pakistan).

Screengrab of the Calibri entry on Wikipedia.

 

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