He seems to be edging toward claiming that the information in the certificate was faked.
He's not edging toward it; he's gone there explicitly. He demands that there is no legal reason preventing the original paper document from being made available for inspection, and that it could be done if only Obama himself would authorize it. Further, he insinuates that Hawaii archive officials have "suspiciously" rebuffed law enforcement officers who have gone their specifically to demand access.
Of course no such law allows Obama to authorize such examination, or anyone else but the curators of such records to examine them directly. And Robert forgets that Arpaio's flunkies were not there as official LEOs, and that Hawaii law strictly governs who may access or request vital records.
But since all their allegations of forgery have been laughed out of court, they have to raise the stakes somehow. Hence all the wild tales that Hawaii is now complicit in the conspiracy.
Wait, so you're saying that you're not "enlightened", and thus cannot understand what Jay was saying?
In this thread, and at length in his JFK thread, Robert's arguments take a decidedly schizophrenic approach to expertise. He demands, as he has lately, that we have to respect the conclusions drawn by certain named experts because, as eyewitnesses or highly qualified practitioners, they have ultimate authority. When we ask to see the credentials and prior work establishing that authority, we are told that to do so would be an "ad hominem" argument, as would be the discovery that the named individuals don't have (and in some cases, don't even claim to have) any of the expertise attributed to them. When we find that the pseudo-experts have no credibility as experts, Robert says that we have to pay attention to their
findings, which suddenly have become independent, objective evidence that can't be undermined by the ineptitude of the people who formulated it.
But if any other expertise -- especially any displayed by JREF partcipants -- is brought to bear on the problem, Robert immediately disregards it as sophistry and handwaving so he can avoid discussing it on its merits. Anyone who has been to college only has "book learning," which has no place in his arguments, either as expert commentary or as refutation. Formal education is not something Robert considers when making his claims, nor anything he seems to respect. Nor does anyone's practical or professional experience matter, if it disagrees with Roberts beliefs. Because no matter how adeptly argued and how factually correct, Robert will still just refer back to his lists of lofty names that apparently trump all of that, no matter how little he has vetted their claims.
In fact, several people have pointed out that your precious quote refers to documents that were layered to begin with, which scans aren't.
Robert still seems confused about the difference between objects and layers. And this is understandable: the pseudo-experts he quotes maintain the same error. Rather than say, "Sorry, we mistook objects for layers," they say, "No, regardless of what anyone else says, those are still 'layers' and they shouldn't be there."
His help file refers to exactly one case: a document produced in Adobe InDesign that has been exported as a 1.6-or-later PDF with certain options selected, and which Adobe Acrobat has difficulty printing correctly because it cannot properly translate the InDesign layer model into the optional-content semantic of Acrobat's /OC and /OCG directives.
(In 1.6 or later, the optional-content model can be used to represent legacy layering information from the authoring application, or it can be used to provide interactive rich content for display only. As with many other design decisions in the PDF format, this one seems not to have been well thought out, and so the help file has been provided to assist in resolving the amphibolistic optional-content directives for printing.)
The Obama PDF is version 1.3, which is long before those directives were introduced, and (as a matter of inspection) contains no layered-content information of any kind, even using the /PieceInfo method described in previous pages.
It is more likely that Robert is simply trying to erode my credibility. He seems to be arguing, "Jay said that PDFs couldn't have layers, but here's a help file from Adobe themselves saying that PDFs have layers, so Jay doesn't know what he's talking about." In other words, he's found the keywords he's looking for, but can't be bothered to understand the underlying concepts to the point of knowing whether the same thing is being discussed.
The sad and inescapable fact remains that Mara Zebest and others simply pointed to ordinary PDF objects -- the kind that all PDF files are composed of -- and mistakenly said they were layers from the authoring application. For all Robert Prey's handwaving about some on-the-fly Acrobat help file, he has completely ignored the deliberate, explicit statement in the Adobe PDF reference manual -- the authoritative work on the subject -- that says in effect, "Don't make the mistake of assuming that any PDF groupings mimic the layers and groups in our creative authoring tools." They specifically call out the Zebest error and specifically say it's an error. So Prey's "Tell it to Adobe" ploy is pretty much dead in the water. Adobe is telling Zebest she's wrong.
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