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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.

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.

That is indeed the conclusion that immediately leaps to mind: A few characters are different, and are antialiased, whereas most are not; therefore the antialiased ones have been tampered with.

However, if they were tampered with, then we have two possibilities:

1) They were tampered with after the layers were separated by the computer process. This is an obvious absurdity for reasons mentioned earlier: anyone doing such tampering would have had no reason to preserve the layers, and every possible reason for eliminating them and releasing a flat image that would not arouse suspicion of tampering.

2) They were tampered with before the layers were separated by the computer process; and in fact are the reason that these particular characters were pulled out when the scanning to pdf process converted a flat document into a layered one.

This is immediately much more satisfactory, but on further glance this theory begins to crumble, too.

First of all, let's look at which letters are antialiased. This is our tentative tamper list.

It includes: The final digit in the certificate number (1), the R in BARACK, 6c, N in Name, f in of, H and al in Hospital, I in Institution, If, h and al in hospital, add in address, L in Limits, 7 in 7a, d in Residence, d in and, S in State, Co in Country, o, in no,, gi in give, the X in a checked box, K in Kenya, ) in Country), S in STANLEY, , in Wichita,, K in Kansas, igna in Signature, of, nt in Parent, the check mark in a check box, a blur in a check box, of, and the A in Attendant.

We have therefore some 30 or so examples of letters that are antialiased. Why these particular letters?

With the sole exceptions of the d in Residence, the R in BARACK, the 1 in the birth certificate number, and the few items that occur in check boxes, they ALL have BOTH of the following characteristics in common:

a) They all occur either at the beginning or end of a word or set of characters OR in very close proximity to a non-text graphic element such as a signature, and

b) There is not the slightest possible reason why anybody would want to change them.

Note that the vast majority of these characters occur in the form itself. It would be very difficult (not to mention meaningless) to redo little letters on the beginnings and ends of words in the form.

In fact, out of the entire list, there is only a single one of the items which if changed could contribute anything meaningful to a forgery. I refer, of course, to the 1 in the certificate number.

Note also that this occurs at the end of a series of characters.

Notice also that one single stroke of the Registrar's signature is NOT antialiased, whereas every other bit of that signature is!

Please explain to me exactly why someone would go through the document and antialias these 30 or so characters, bearing in mind the difficulty of getting a good match on the little letters of the form itself -

...and ALSO bearing in mind that by this difficult method, they know that they are going to arouse suspicion of a forgery... when they could have much easier simply edited the document, made it look perfect, and released it as a flat-layer JPG.

You have also stated:

[The] reason letters and words were missing from the white layer is because [t]hey were parts of other words and data that were edited out and replaced.

Perhaps you can expand on what you mean by this. Having examined the graphic, I see no letters and words "missing from the white layer." Every single letter and every signature stroke has a white layer around it. There are, as far as I can tell, only two possible explanations for this.

1) the white outline was created by a software-driven process, or

2) the white outline was quite deliberately created as an anti-shadow by a human being.

Since 2) again makes absolutely no sense at all, we are back to the scan-to-pdf process as an explanation for this phenomenon as well.

In short: at the moment, I see no remotely reasonable way for your theory to be possible.