Deconstructing the President's birth certificate (read before you judge).

I'm a designer who's an expert in PDF's (stop giggling!) and hacking apart PDF's and similar types of documents is a small hobby for me. Granted, this isn't hacking in any real sense, but I certainly piqued my interest for non-political reasons.

Luckily for you, I've done a lot of the footwork for you and have posted my results below.

I just downloaded the form here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/birth-certificate-long-form.pdf and popped it open in Illustrator CS5. The article is correct in that it is not one flat scan, it is a composition. It's composed of 10 sub-layers most of which contain very small portions of scanned text.

More than likely, there were multiple scans made of the same document, and they were collated into this image or Optical Character Recognition was used for the scan. Editing isn't particularly surprising if certain sections needed to be touched up, but it is unusual.

It's not an issue really but, I don't understand why they didn't just flatten everything before converting it to final PDF.

For those interested, I made jpgs of the exploded document so that you can see exactly what is removed when the layers are sequentially turned off. Check it out here: http://imgur.com/a/Wy6li.

Maybe it's the equivalent of a clerical error, or maybe it's a political move to keep the birther's frothing at the mouth. Or maybe it's nothing at all. So it goes.

The birther movement pains me every time I hear it. It is the worse logic I have ever heard, and I immediately lose respect for any person that mentions it like it's possibly true. It pains me not just to see this stuff here rather than reddit, but the fact that enough people upvoted this so that it would get to the top of the 'Ask' section of HN. I wish the government never would have released Obama's birth certificate, because it only serves to somehow validate that the birther's claim "might" be true and thus must be disproved.

To the original poster: Don't take this personally. I actually enjoyed hearing you breakdown how this pdf was composed. Not only would pdf composition/hacking articles be interesting, but they would also be appropriate for HN. Write a blog, I'd check it out...

If you want to attack or discredit Obama, thats fine. Just do it in a way that doesn't sound like a bunch of third graders arguing over someone having coodies. This inability to think critically is destroying America. We've become a nation of people that emulate the talking heads on t.v. that do nothing more than argue over each other until one gives up.

Of course that doesn't mean there's an illegitimate president. Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.

And there's certainly no shortage of stupidity on both sides.

I've had a policy for some time, where any time I see "common sense" in an argument, I discount the entire thing.

It looks like I'm going to have to institute the same policy for the phrase "legitimate question". The same thing keeps coming up in "truther" arguments as well, and this will help me filter those as well.

ADDED:

Are you into censorship too?

You need to get a handle on what that word actually means. Deciding that something's silly, and that we'd all prefer to ignore it, has absolutely nothing to do with censorship.

...should get answers

You are functioning as the heckler in a "Heckler's Veto"[1]. By constantly insisting that your "legitimate questions" must be answered you interfere with the conduct of any other discourse.

[1] http://www.rbs2.com/heckler.htm