Reply #45: unfortunately it means your friend is not wrong

[elana i am]

i just opened the pdf file from the white house site in illustrator myself, and it turns out he's right. what he is seeing isn't just clipping paths though, but also bounding boxes (both demonstrated by the blue lines in his example you've linked) from placed images that have had clipping masks applied to them.

it means that the green patterned background is a seperate image placed into the illustrator file. and not only that's but it looks like the original copy of the certificate may have been on that paper and they whited it out. it also means that each of those little sections surrounded by a blue bounding box in your top example is also a separate transparent bitmap image (presumably of what was whited out on the green paper) placed in the illustrator file (except that empty bounding box on the lower left). i'm literally sitting here moving all the pieces of this pdf file around. unfortunately your friend is not lying and he does know what he's talking about.

i know this is real, because it came directly from the white house website, but this was a PISS POOR way of presenting this document to the public. and i mean PISS POOR because they couldn't hardly have done it in a way that made it look more doctored. i could post an image of all the pieces moved around, but i'd rather not unless you need to see it to believe it.

obama has got some *real geniuses* working for him... x(:wtf: :spank: :grr:x(:wtf: :spank: :grr:x(:wtf: :spank: :grr: