Originally and possibly still, the "short form" process made sense. It was even done when the short form *information* was saved on written logs. It's much cheaper in terms of storage space, physical or computer memory (tape, disk, even punched cards) to just save the information, in character format, than an image of the whole thing. My impression is that giving out abstracts is a recent development and has taken place after the technology to store and retrieve digital images became available. In the old days, they'd fetch the paper out of a physical file, photostat it, sign it, stamp it, and mail it. A totally manual process, except for the photocopying step.
As early as the seventies, the technology to store an online database of abstracts existed. Images would have been out of the question, of course. But it would have been easy for a minicomputer of the day to retrieve an abstract out of an index-sequential file and print a certificate identical to the modern Hawaiian short form, albeit probably dot-matrix or line-printer, not laser.
So, it's strange that they should be reverting to abstracts even as digital image storage is now trivially available.
My impression is that giving out abstracts is a recent development and has taken place after the technology to store and retrieve digital images became available The COLB/abstracts are not images, they are generated when requested from information, characters, stored in a database. Characters take many few bits than an image of that character would take. The stuff on Free republic, except the images, is stored as characters, probably something called ASCI characters, although another similar encoding, UTF-8, is also possible. Here is an image of the printable ACSI (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) characters (ASCI-II)
But each character only takes 1 byte to store (actually 7/8th of a byte) so the all the characters could be stored in 83 1/8 bytes, the image takes 22,338 bytes. Storing small amounts of bytes, per record, has been possible for lots of years. Storing images for lots of records, and having them on-line, is only just becoming possible.