Halos: A slight diversion for gsgs

While I am working on Part IV in the series on the LFBC and the Xerox WorkCentre’s I thought I would take time to follow-up on the halo creation in PDF’s that occurs when documents with color backgrounds and dark text are scanned on a WorkCentre with MRC compression.

I created a very simple document. I printed a text document from MS Word on a sheet of green security paper and then scanned it on the WorkCentre 7535 to email as a PDF using all the default settings (300 dpi, color, Edge Erase set to 0.1”).

The result was just as I expected. When the document is opened in Illustrator it is rotated to landscape mode. I have found this to be consistently true. There are technical reasons for that happening that will be covered later. It always happens with Illustrator. Other programs render the Xerox PDF’s correctly. It was true of the PDF I discussed in the previous article but for clarity I rotated the overall PDF and the layers to portrait for clarity.

While I did this just for fun the document turned out to be very useful.Here is the PDf version from the Xerox WorkCentre 7535: Zebest on Green SP

Let’s take a look at my “Zebest” test document:

This is a cell phone photo so there is a little glare from the flash. You can see that the letters are nice and crisp and without halos.

I scanned the document in the trusty WorkCentre 7435 to see what would happen. Would Mara’s own words create halos?

Here is the full scan: (Notice the border added by the Xerox Edge Erase feature)

This is a high resolution PNG file exported from Illustrator and rotated. Here is part of the text blown up to show the halos:

Let’s zoom in even more to show the halos:

Yep, there they are.

What about the layers? We should expect that the WorkCentre 7535 and MRC/JBIG  compression would create the familiar background JPG and multiple foreground masks. Indeed that is what we see. In the case of this simple document there are three layers. One is the familiar background JPG with the green security background. Also notice the white “holes” where the test was extracted to form the monochrome masks.

Here are the layers: I left them in landscape as they appear in Illustrator:

Background:

So do you still think the green background was added in the way Mara Zebest claimed it was in her affidavit? Remember what Ms. Zebest said?

In summation, the security paper background layer was added as the last step to create the illusion of an image in which text was imprinted on security paper. However, the text had in fact

been placed and arranged on a solid white background. This last application gives a created image the false appearance of being an official document.

Source: Report Barack Obama Long Form Birth Certificate Page 9.

Here are the two monochrome text layers exported from Illustrator:

So as you can see even in such a simple document as this the Xerox separated the text out somewhat randomly into two layers.

I wish to give a special shout out to Mara Zebest for her contribution to this article. Also thanks to gsgs for asking questions. There is nothing wrong with asking questions as long as you are willing to listen to the answers.