Apologies First - Mind Blown - Obama's Birth Certificate

[Hrabovsky]

This Birther junk is big in the news here in Georgia because of some legal suit filed to prevent Barry from being on the 2012 ballot due to the apparently still looming question of his citizenship. Yadda, yadda, yadda.... The judge says he should appear in court this week. Whatever.

It piqued my interest enough to finally go to the White House site and view the document. Things got weird immediately, as it looked legit enough on screen to your average Joe Public, but it looked weird to me. Halos around type. varying blacks. Differing typefaces.

I saved the PDF to my desktop and opened it in Illustrator CS4, selected it. It had a clipping mask so I released and ungrouped it—and ye gods—this thing is totally fake. Cobbled together. View as outlines and you can see the frame edges. Scans don't have multiple clipping masks.

Download it, drag the PDF into AI and look for yourself.

President Obama's Long Form Birth Certificate | The White House

[standard]

Looks like all text colored (roughly) #1B2D1F got grouped together, and text that fell outside that got grouped separately. I don't think that's a conspiracy, it's just the way the PDF was encoded. Note that if you delete all the text off the green background, the white letter spaces remaining still match the text.

[vastagh]

i dont see what youre talking about. it looks like a bitmapped scan.

[standard]

two links on the page. he's talking about the 2nd one (long form).

[vastagh]

ohhhh. i see. yeah, looks weird.

[DWITT]

please don't quote spam - tom

You hit the nail on the head, comrade!

[Hrabovsky]

Maybe they used multiple scans? Seems like the most obvious result of a scan would be a single compressed JPG embedded in a frame for a PDF. The pre-press forensic thing gets me every now and then. Multiple paths were not what I was expecting.

Here's a couple shots of what happens. The left one is the selected items after releasing the mask. The right is the Layers palette showing all the groups and paths that I have dragged all over the place.



The Links palette has a few embedded images in it, too. Text fragments.

Acrobat Pro has the metadata, and it looks like an AI file saved out as a PDF via Preview using OS10.6.7 Quartz.

[Barry Obama]

did they use house paint?

[mikeage]

is it possible that this is just a result of cleaning up a scan so it's legible?

[Barry Obama]

I blame George Bush