So I guess 1961 could eventually be Morph-font-lated to be 2542.
I think your on to something. I once knew someone who would eat mushrooms and be able to do similar things.
Here’s a much better Youtube:
Obama Birth Certificate Faked In Adobe Illustrator - Official Proof 1 ( Layers )
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s9StxsFllY
Downloading the PDF and opening it up in Adobe Illustrator clearly demonstrates “layers” of images which show how the document was assembled. There’s no possible way that the PDF posted to the whitehouse.gov website was a simple scan/copy of an original document.
http://whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/birth-certificate-long-form.pdf
Not really, because it mirrors the original as closely as possible. If the letters are particularly illegible, it might have a hard time recognizing the correct letters for the purposes of searching, though. In terms of what the document looks like, it's not going to drastically change the content.
I should add that you can see this in the birth certificate PDF by comparing the product of the scan with the OCR output that was posted around the Web. Notice how the scanner detected the 4 in "10641" as a 1, but the actual PDF represented it as a (slightly faded) 4.
I believe there's an option that would replace the scanned letters with a standard font version of the detected letter, but you would only use that with pristine text, not a 50 year-old typewritten document.