JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Correct. To presume the resulting Illustrator document tree should accurately reflect either the native PDF object hierarchy or the optional-content hierarchy is completely unfounded.
Or even especially well. As I mentioned, Illustrator is a law unto itself at Adobe, and they do many things differently in Illustrator than in the rest of the Creative Suite products. This leads to the importation quirks Abaddon mentioned. There is only one product Adobe makes that considers PDF its native storage format: Adobe Acrobat.
This, and all the other equivalent comments are absolutely correct. The PDF file has, had, and will have absolutely no bearing on the determination of Barack Obama's eligibility to the Presidency. The question of birth place was answered according to documentation in paper form produced, certified, and accepted by appropriate authority. Other disclosures to the public, in whatever form, have no statutory authority or restriction, and are not a matter of Constitutional concern. The courts have ruled on this point time and again.
Correct. Adobe Portable Document Format is a persistent-storage format and byte-stream content protocol used to describe mixed-media documents independent of the application program that produced them. Programs may generate PDF output that they intend to be reasonably equivalent to their internal data structures and formats. Programs may read PDF as input and attempt to render the document description objects as best they can in their own native data structures.
Yes. There are many applications from many vendors that are useful for inspecting PDF files and presenting the underlying objects in a way that preserves the structure and intent of the underlying PDF language. Adobe Illustrator is not one of them. And as previously outlined, Adobe Illustrator is perhaps the poorest choice of all Adobe products to import PDF data and view the contents. Hence when someone claiming to be an expert in PDF documents starts his analysis, "When I open the file in Illustrator..." you can be sure he's not the expert he says he is.
Adobe Acrobat is the Adobe product of choice for manipulating PDF files as native data. And even when I use Acrobat Professional, as Robert's help file applies, to add layer information and save the result as a new PDF, Illustrator fails to identify more than one layer when importing the "layered" PDF. All the objects, regardless of layer, go into the single importation layer.
Nevertheless, since the Obama PDF is so simple and straightforward, Illustrator does render it reasonably faithfully to the original object hierarchy. There is exactly one layer, as Illustrator understands the term, and within that layer are 9 displayable objects. Robert (and many other of his pseudo-experts) clearly have little if any experience reading the Illustrator document tree panel, and still to this day mistake objects for application layers. The PDF language reference specifically warns against that misinterpretation.
In any case, PDF is a human-readable format. The best way to understand what's going on in a PDF file is to open it in a text editor such as Wordpad or vim and simply read the directives. I've done just that and presented my analysis to Robert, who clearly doesn't understand it. I've also spoon-fed him the PDF data right here in this forum and asked him to identify in it the logical elements he says are there. But again, he refuses to do that. It's an open format. Learning to read and understand PDF files is not rocket science. However, none of Robert's "experts" can manage to do it, which is exactly why none of them is accepted as an expert in court.
Hence his whole argument "Forget 'Full Faith and Credit,' the document is forged I tells ya!" falls flatter than a watered-down pancake. There is no credible evidence that the document has been forged. All this hullabaloo about the PDF is distraction.
