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I do know (I'm a Mac user) that there's a filter for "Reduce File Size" when you're creating a PDF in at least one Apple program--I don't know exactly what it does, though.

What do you think of the teaching profession?

It would be because after the letters were extracted from the background, the background was "downsampled" to a lower resolution. That "expert" I pointed you to before (I'm only using quotes because it's WND that labeled her an expert--I can't vouch for her myself) wrote:

"The use of OCR software and image optimization have a number of other effects on documents. Each of these issues, which can result from OCR or optimization processing, may have led to the appearance of tampering and manipulation, and accusations of forgery."

"Pixel size: In any scanned image, pixels are all the same size. Pixels in the President’s birth certificate, however, are not. The pixels around the optimized text are a much smaller size than the background pixels."

Coarser pixels are "De-optimized." Not "Optimized. Under no circumstances does it make sense to coarsen the resolution. None. It makes even less sense to coarsen the resolution while at the same time increasing the bit depth. They are contra purpose to each other! It just makes stuff look fuzzy.

What do you think of the teaching profession?

I'm not sure what you're getting at, but my mother was a teacher, so tread carefully.

Coarser pixels are "De-optimized." Not "Optimized. Under no circumstances does it make sense to coarsen the resolution. None.

Sure it does. If you're optimizing for file size, reducing resolution is one way to achieve that. From Adobe's Help page on optimizing options:

Downsample Reduces file size by lowering the resolution of images, which involves merging the colors of original pixels into larger pixels.
Note: Masked images and images with a size less than 16-by-16 pixels are not downsampled.

The question is whether some optimization procedures can do that certain parts of a scan while leaving other parts at a higher resolution. I think one explanation for the "layers" in the document was that they were caused by a mask, so maybe that's why the characters aren't downsampled.