Originally posted by Arlo
Well I'm no coder but I don't see why it couldn't be possible to do on a website even. I use the Geocities engine to do layered html all the time. I've layered all sorts of images and if I leave the top one alone I can merely upload stuff behind it and voila'. I wouldn't be surprised in the least if someone scripted something that can do that automagically. Even incorporate some randomness by having multiple yet similar handwritten fonts.
Yes it's possible - in the same way that it's possible to cook a thanksgiving turkey using only a series of individual fresh peanuts on the end of a pin held underneath it as fuel. In other words it's a time-consuming and ridiculously convoluted way of doing it, to the point that it's so unlikely that anyone would even bother (especially given that there are perfectly good ovens available) that we can rule it out as a likely source with one slash of Occam's razor.
You'd need lots of fonts (an absolute minimum of 4 - but if you do each letter different maybe up to 50), worked out so that:
1) The kerning works with all the different combinations of all the different letters
2) The sizes of the letters of all the different fonts are within a narrow size range.
3) The stroke weight of the different fonts match.
4) The letter styles are the same but show enough difference to look like handwriting.
All the above basically entails making your own typefaces, which is
really time-consuming: 26 x 2 + 10 (for numbers) + 13 - minimum punctuation & symbols (!?@$&,.:;"' ) - a total of 75 glyphs per face - times the minimum of 4 = 300.
So that's 300 characters to be scanned or drawn, touched up by hand to avoid jaggies and weirdness, aligned, and finally kerned in relation to 299 other characters across four typefaces.
And why bother? 99.9% of the population wouldn't even notice it wasn't the same font, and they wouldn't be impressed if you told them. Coders would laugh at you making stuff overly complicated.
Then there's the image layering coding... to produce a JPG that can miss out a few letters of your typefaces and cover them seamlessly with a kid's hand.
And the pic's model is inexplicably censored, blackmail style - hardly standard policy on an "add your dumb slogan here" site: it points to a pic that lacks a model release or copyright - dangerous stuff in a litigious place like the US. And utterly unecessary if it's a harmless empty sign.
In fact the only things lacking in this magic website theory to make it convoluted enough to be discussed forever is some blurry footage of a guy in a car jerking his head back and to the left after frame 314 and an almost pristine condition 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano round.
Or you could just use photoshop, and only waste half an hour or so. Then cover the text you put on so lovingly with a kid's hand and some really amateur censorship... and inexplicably censor bar the Marine's eyes.
Or there's the
really far out conspiracy theory: which requires the unlikely elements of: a US marine in combat zone with twisted sense of humor, a camera, a buddy to hold the camera, a felt-tip marker, some cardboard and two kids who don't read enough English to know what the sign says. No messy mysteries about the censorship or the handwriting look or the kid's hand covering the text either. Aha! That's it - a lone marine as the patsy - no wonder they censored the name! Lcpl Oswald, the game's up, I'm afraid.
