Plain talk's question is not ridiculous. There are two ways you could produce the certificate we are seeing. You could laser-print the database output on stationery preprinted with the green pattern and Hawaii insignia and black border (or, as long as we're antiquing here, you could feed pin-fed forms through a 1403 with a PN train and a mylar ribbon). Or you generate the entire image in the computer, database output, green pattern, black border and all, and laser-print that on plain paper. Of course, to do the latter, you need a color printer and much fancier software. But you get out of having to keep the preprinted forms in inventory. Prompted by differences in the border details, some have speculated that Hawaii may have switched from the first method to the second sometime between DaCosta and Obama.
I wonder if the original document is somewhere. Or did they destroy it after entering its key details into the database? The last time I asked for my birth certificate, they gave me a cruddy photostat of the original, embossed with a raised seal and an official signature. No doubt it costs less to do it the way Hawaii does it.
Color laser prints are not cheap. Using preprinted forms would be cheaper and more secure. If jobs are done in batches, switching forms is really not an issue.
Further, it would be strange to have the green design extend past the border if it wasn't going to go to the paper edge; most printers would have a hard time doing the latter.
Plain talk’s question is not ridiculous. There are two ways you could produce the certificate we are seeing. You could laser-print the database output on stationery preprinted with the green pattern and Hawaii insignia and black border (or, as long as we’re antiquing here, you could feed pin-fed forms through a 1403 with a PN train and a mylar ribbon). Or you generate the entire image in the computer, database output, green pattern, black border and all, and laser-print that on plain paper.
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I thought that it was a foregone conclusion that birth certs were printed on specially printed forms... these certs all have printing all the way to the edges which is not possible with any laser printer that I know of... if these were produced on a color laser we would see a yellow dot with encoded information somewhere on the form that gives us the ESN of the printer that produced the document... find that dot and you can say beyond a shadow of a doubt if these various docs were printed on different printers or if they are all generations of one master forgery.
P.S. wasn’t a 1403 a hammer and band type? pretty hard to get printing that good out of one ,, at best they always looked like selectric output with dirt/crud embedded in the crevices of the “tighter” letters.. The only laser that might be involved would be a desktop HP model if preprinted forms were used ,, a 3800 would be too old for current use and too new for back then..
Have you considered the possibility of a form-fillable PDF file, which has the COLB template, complete with borders, field headers, and Seal of Hawaii?
What would you call a PDF whose entire page was a graphic, but that became a template, with form fillable fields on it?
Is that so hard to imagine?
It’s not because I’ve worked for the Health Department of Florida and we converted a numbder of certificates to form-fillable PDF files.