ocularist

Baraka,

i must respectfully say that either you are ignorant of typesetting, or you are intentionally misleading people: which is it?

PROPORTIONAL typesetting has nothing to do with KERNING.

In your link to the IBM example of a typewriter with PROPORTIONAL capabilities, IBM created a typewriter that was cognizant of the actual widths of letters of the typeface they designed. each letter was struck, and spaced out to the next letter only the width of that letter. this did not reqiire that the typewriter be cognizant of LETTER PAIRS. AT NO TIME do the descenders of a following letter actually encroach upon the vertical space of a prior letter, as is done in KERNING.

KERNING needs the intelligence of LETTER PAIRS, which when typeset by a book printer, was done in lead by the knowledge of the person putting the letters in the rack (HE would be the person understanding letter pairs like -ly, or -ty, etc) or by a computer that is able to look ahead in the letter stream.

NO TYPEWRITER OF THE 60's or any other time possessed this knowledege; nor is it possible because the typewriter cannot strike until it knows the next letter following to decide to HOW MUCH TO SPACE.

LOOK AT THE EXAMPLE PAGE at that IBM link you provided: you WILL NOT SEE any example of descender encroachment!!!

SO, we're back to the original poster's question-- the answer is that kerning is present in Mr. Obama's "original long form birth certificate", something that is not physically possible with ANY TYPEWRITER -- this forces the issue that it MUST NECESSARILY BE A FORGERY, and unfortunately, a simple-minded one at that...

I say simple-minded, because I have been digitizing and OCR'ing documents for some 15 years involving archival quality documents and results--I even have friends at Adobe (creator of the pdf format utilized by the forger), and have been involved with their beta testing programs, so I'm fully aware of the "tricks" that can be used to simulate a forgery.

If you enlarge the "white house" document to let's say 800%, and look at the "typewritten" letters, you will notice an interesting anomaly-- something not physically possible with an actual typewriter: every instance of the same letter is identical!! On a typewriter, if you strike. row of a's for example, the physical force of the hammer striking the ribbon and then the paper behind it creates an ink blob that "looks like" an "a". But if you enlarge the image of the "a" with a magnifying glass, you will immediately notice that the edges are not crisp...there are areas of grey around the letters where very little ink was put to paper, and in addition, as the ribbon moves (being made of fabric in thise days), varying amounts of ink would be applied. As a result, each "a" is as individual as a fingerprint!

To produce a forgery as simple minded as this one is, all one has to do is "digitize" an example of each letter off of an existing birth certificate. When a computer lays the pattern down, to the unaided eye (without zoom or magnification), each letter in a row will look like that "a" we just talked about... HOWEVER, EACH "a" will be identical!

So, what happened here is that the "forger" was an idiot not familiar with the tell-tale signs of digitization, and also forgot to turn off kerning (the forger, had he been aware, could have done this).

THIS ALSO TELLS ME THAT THE CIA AND FBI WERE NOT INVOLVED in this forgery!

WHY? Because THEY have the ability to produce a forgery that is correct! THEY MAINTAIN WAREHOUSES OF ACTUAL EQUIPMENT and PAPER. They would have taken the typeface and pulled an actual typewriter of thqt make and model, pulled out the actual paper (they have reams of actual paper -- every one ever produced) and produced a forgery indistinguishable from a real one! THEY would have made sure the document sequence numbers were correct (Mr Obama's is earlier than those produced a day later). THEY would have matched the culture of the time (Mr Obama's talks about "African"-- a term not used to describe his race at that time)... and a host of other "issues".

SO WHAT CONFUSES ME, IS *NOT THAT* this is a forgery--it most certainly is, but why the CIA or FBI were not called upon to produce the forgery???!!! -- which agency could certainly have made it a lot harder to prove a forgery than this micky-mouse attempt that the white-house has unashamedly committed itself to (what an embarrassment-- they had the technology and did not use it!?)