Chiyome Fukino has said the paper copy is bound into a book stored somewhere at the Department of Health. She said she has personally examined it twice. And, indeed, the image put out by the White House does look like a copy made by pressing a book down on a copier glass. Not unlike what you'd find at a pre-computer deeds registry. I've visited one or two of those. They have tens of thousands of books, each with hundreds of pages of documents, chained to one another by book, page references.
If it were that simple, they would have simply looked it up and scanned it and release it year ago. There is more to this than that.
They have a law against that. Absent a special court order, only the subject of the document or his close relative or legal representative can get a copy. That's what's enabled Zero to make the most of the controversy.
From microfiche or microfilm there is no issue with resolution. It is not stored in memory for that purpose. Once it is scanned to a file and burned to the microfiche it is not retained in computer memory. That was the way it was done years ago. Some records probably do exist in a database today, but they are not the document itself, but only the reference information for the document.
You got that right.
They should have scanned all their documents at a good resolution (300 dpi?) into a database. They could easily replicate the database on the mainland, in case Mauna Loa blows.
And there's no point in giving out paper documents, anyway. They should just give out links to document images in their database. That way, there would be no room for disputes about what may have been done to a paper document after it left the Health Department.
Have you ever created an index? I have. For 5-1/2 years I created and maintained a 3,000 page catalog for a wholesaler (37,000 items). The index entries were about 11,000 lines in a spreadsheet. (index entries, cross index entries, reverse naming index entries)
I extracted the final item sequencing from the print PDF so I could sort for reprinting the sections. Used PDFTK to open the .pdf, used an editor to remover the proportional spacing syntax where the numeral "1" was followed by the numeral "1". Then I used Grep to extract the numeric item numbers in sequence. Splashed that in a database with the new item description data and all I had to manually sort were the "new items". Then I would import the .txt file into Quark using Xdata. It worked great.