Reply #21: A quick primer on "Adobe."

[Atman]

Adobe is a company, not a product. Adobe sells software products such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, Flash, After Effects, etc. These are all various design/media production products. Another product they sell is something called Acrobat.

Most of you have something called Adobe Reader on your PC or Mac. Reader is a "light" version of Acrobat. Acrobat is the program used for creating PDF files that can be edited across work groups; for making forms which can be filled out online; for combining several other PDF files into one multi-page file. Adobe Reader, otoh, only READS the PDF files created by other software. For instance, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc, can all save files as PDFs. However, unless specifically marked as being editable within the parent application which created them, the saved PDFs are read-only documents (or fill-in forms).

I point this out only to further demonstrate the fraud the OP's friend is trying to perpetrate. It is ridiculous to assume the White House lawyer would have flown to Hawaii with his own scanner and a compatible Photoshop plug-in, and then saved the scanned document as an editable Photoshop PDF before posting it online. Even if it had been "retouched" after the fact, a read-only PDF (which is all that the vast majority of users would have access to) would not have clipping masks evident. The whole thing is 100% ridiculous.