The Birth Certificate & Illustrator

(obama, illustrator, PDF, acrobat, seriously?)

Let’s nip this one in the bud, shall we? After the President revealed his long-form birth certificate today in an attempt to stop the Trump-inspired hysteria, tweets like this started appearing:

“I opened the birth certificate in Adobe Illustrator and there are 8 layers. Fake.”

Websites like this one show a suspicious grouping of layers in the PDF file. Groups of images and clipping masks - obviously, it means that the expert forgers in The White House have put this together in order to fool the media!

Perhaps not. For instance, take this scanned image (the first page of a visa application filled out by somebody who has had a few aliases in his time. And other times).

I then saved the JPEG as a PDF in Mac OS X Preview and opened it up in Illustrator:

Original scanned image turned into a PDF

As you can see, there’s only the one group and clipping mask, which is what people expect to see from a scanned image. However, if I then go to Acrobat and select the ‘Optimize Scanned PDF’ option (using just the defaults), and open the new PDF up, I get a different result.

New ‘fake’ PDF

Look, lots of images and clipping masks, just like as seen in the birth certificate! It’s a fake! Or, thanks to Acrobat, it’s transformed a 1MB PDF into a 33kb one. ‘Optimized’, even.

To sum up: the birth certificate is not a fake. Instead, the Administrator has just used Acrobat to make the file smaller and thus save the American taxpayer money by cutting down on bandwidth costs. Stop trying to find nefarious activity in everything the Obama Administration does, please.

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