Nobody has ever maintained that they were. Certainly I haven't.
Anti-aliasing computer graphics algorithms did not exist back in 1961.
Again, no one has maintained that they were.
It seems that you're missing the obvious (and to some degree, PROVEN) explanation for the existence of the layers.
Have you noticed that some letters are antialiased, while letters right next to them, in the exact same word, are NOT antialiased?
Does this not strike you as odd?
In fact, if you look at the layers, an odd pattern emerges. There are quite a few letters in the very text of the form itself that are separated from the layer you would expect them to be on - the layer with the vast majority of the text from the form - and on another layer entirely. Like antialiased letters from the larger words (the R in BARACK and the 1 in the certificate number), the letters separated from their "proper" layer seem to be random.
Why is this?
The obvious explanation is that it is an artifact of a non-human process.
And in fact, this has been confirmed by a FReeper named reegs who first printed out the birth certificate document (I believe in full color but you might have to ask him) and then scanned the print back in to a PDF file.
The result he got was similar to the original: a document with layers in it. And the interesting thing is that portions of BARACK and the certificate number scanned into separate layers just like in the PDF he started with.
Obviously there is a machine process that took place in scanning the original document in - again, the process has been, in broad strokes at least, duplicated by reegs.
And why do I discount that the layers we see in the White House would have been created by a human being? Well, first of all we know that the machine process can and most likely did create the layers. Secondly, if you look at the actual contents of each layer, it is virtually inconceivable that any human being would create a document in that way.
It even seems very unlikely that a human being would have touched up layers already created by the machine process. Why? Because any human being that did so would obviously know about the layers. And any human being who was thinking about the layers would realize the obvious: that releasing a document with these layers might arouse suspicion of a fraud. Therefore the sanest, safest thing to do, if one were modifying layers already created, would be to merge the layers back in together and release a cleaner FLAT document.
In that way a great deal of suspicion could have been avoided.
Of course I noticed some of the letters were anti-aliased and some were not. That’s how I know the document was tampered with. Unless, of course, you want to maintain that the anti-aliased letters were somehow through an act of Divine Intelligence automatically put in place as substitute characters for what was missing in the original scan. And, the very presence of the anti-aliased characters shows that they were added. Which means the document was tampered with, and was not a flat scan. And, why would they be missing from the original scan in the first place?
There is a reason letters and words were missing from the white layer. They were parts of other words and data that were edited out and replaced. Because words and data were copied and pasted from other sources, and those particular letters contained artifacts that the creators didn’t want displayed in the final document. And, you will notice there is more than one “white layer” with data that was added later.
It’s not rocket science. You put the paper or microfilm down on the scanner, and you scan it. You send the file of the scanned image to the requester, or you print it out and send it to them. You’re done. It’s as simple as that. You don’t “doctor” it with Photoshop, or any other graphics program, and then try to call it authentic. I attached an example of how to do this in an earlier post. Mine had no editing layers, because I didn’t edit it.