Is Barack Obama's birth-certificate a phoney?

World Net Daily have an interesting article on this subject that I have raised before; here's an extract:

'A nationally recognized computer expert who has served as contributing author and technical editor for more than 100 books on Adobe and Microsoft software says the Obama long-form birth-certificate image released by the White House is a fraudulent document created with Adobe software.

"The PDF file released by the White House contains evidence of manipulation suggesting that one or more forgers utilized existing Hawaiian birth certificates to assemble fraudulently for Barack Obama a document the president presented to the world as authentic," Mara Zebest told WND.

...

Exhibit 2 offers more examples of the telltale inconsistencies Zebest found. First, defining her terms, Zebest explains that "antialiasing" is the transition of pixel colors that occurs when differing color tones bump into each other in an image. It offers a smooth line (to the eye) when viewed at the normal zoom. Viewed in a closeup mode it appears as an angled pattern. She explains, "Without antialiasing, the edges appear jagged or bitmapped." Bitmapping is a specific computer format used for images that gives them a more choppy appearance when zoomed.

According to Zebest:

* Bitmap text versus antialiasing text: Notice the bitmap X checkbox in question compared to the antialiased X checkbox in question "e" – major inconsistency.

* Additionally, the checkboxes are slightly different widths and positioned differently. (Pixels of checkboxes on the bottom right overlap line pixels below, almost as if the boxes were copied and pasted and manually positioned).

* Some letter characters are identical, pixel for pixel, almost as if they were copied and pasted and then moved into position. For example, the lowercase "i" in the word Inside is identical to the first "i" in judicial. There are many similar identical instances as there are dissimilar typesetting examples of different fonts – both suggesting compilation of a document digitally.

* Irregular typesetting spacing which is not consistent with proportional spacing used by computers or monospacing used by typewriters in 1961 – but is consistent with copy and pasting and moving letters around. Example: The word "Yes," which has too much space between "Y" and "e" and not enough space between "e" and "s."

"A normal document scanned and saved as a PDF file would not display these inconsistencies unless the document had been digitally altered," she said. "A digitally altered document is by definition a manufactured document, or in everyday parlance – a forgery."'

I know that general wisdom has it that only kooks and loons still question Barack Obama's birth certificate, however there do seem to be questions... Here's the article's conclusion:

Zebest concluded that whoever forged the Obama birth certificate probably did most of the digital manipulation required to construct the document using the program Adobe Photoshop.

Then, the manipulated document was transported to Adobe Illustrator for final touch-up before being released to the public.

She believes whoever created the forgery had insufficient expertise and did not realize that "flattening" the document in Photoshop Illustrator – a process that melds the layers – would still allow professionals to determine the layers required to manipulate the data in the process of forging the document.

"Overall, it's an amateur job," Zebest said. "The forgers obviously over-estimated their level of expertise in undertaking to forge a document that is destined to play a pivotal role in U.S. history."

How could any forger working for the White House be so sloppy?

"As president of the United States, you can't exactly put out a Request for Proposal asking the forger to submit credentials and pricing to the White House chief of staff," she answered. "A small group around you may be loyal, and someone within that group may have computer graphic arts experience, but forging a document that will sustain expert forensic analysis is a skill-set not required of most commercial designers and artists who use Adobe software on an everyday basis."'