“Why would they scan it on the Xerox and not save it until it was on a Mac?”
The Xerox WorkCentre emailed the PDF directly to the users in-box. That person opened it on a Mac, but it could also have been opened on a windows based computer.
“If the Xerox does all scans in landscape orientation, then wouldn’t the tax form be sideways unless it was first previewed, rotated, and then saved - yielding a PDF producer other than the Xerox?”
The tax forms are in landscape when you open them in Adobe Illustrator. But when you view them in Adobe Photoshop, Acrobat Reader or Preview they are in portrait mode. The software seems to recognize the orientation.
As to the timing. the tax returns are not just available at the White House website, they are also on other sites like the Tax History Project. Here is the wayback machine’s view of the THP site from April 20, 2011.
If the PDF was created on the Xerox WorkCentre, that should be what is listed as the PDF Producer, even if the PDF was emailed to a different computer. Just opening a document doesn’t change the program that created the document.
Why did they treat the BC and COLB differently than they treated the tax forms? If the tax forms were gonna be fine going straight from the Xerox to being posted online, then why weren’t the long-form and COLB gonna be fine?