WORST Font for Optical Character Recognition?

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See also post 335,017
This weekend I’m in the business of thwarting thieves (post 702,207)
Obfuscation rules!
A user can print my document and OCR it (tricky with my watermark and graphics on each page, but ….)
Has anyone direct knowledge of a Windows font that is easy for humans to read, but difficult for OCR/scanner software?
Fonts such as “Alexei Copperplate” don’t count, because they are not easy for humans to read.

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Wingdings?

Seriously though, I wonder if you can do something with kerning or similar to jam the letters up (or even impinge on each other) to an extent that would mess up OCR but hardly affect human readability.

Alan

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I’d better go back and re-read Choosing fonts

>do something with kerning or similar to jam the letters up
Thanks! (attached PrtScr)

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Pick any font you like, but preferably one that most are likely to have, and of a modest file size if you are likely to want to embed it. The so-called Web Fonts are very widely held, and Georgia and Verdana are complements. A different set, which virtually everyone has but few seem to use, are the Lucidas, all of which are designed to be complementary, and which I would recommend for your purposes.

Review your material with an eye for layout and search for elements that you know to be essential. Pick a few that would be hard to spot and very hard to replace, cruise up to the toolbar, and colour the text white (or colourless, i.e. the colour of the background).

Presto, it’s invisible, but that in no way prevents the program from using it. So long as the bad guys don’t play with colours, it will remain invisible to all, including or especially an OCR.

If you’d like to carry it further, preferably using a different trick, then plaster the page with the name of the client in such a way that it remains hidden but can be flicked on at any time using a simple trick.

Be sure to make allowance for crash recoveries, clean installs, drive upgrades, and all manner of trouble on the part of the user. Some of us are very low tech when it comes to systems, and we don’t enjoy the benefit of having a system administrator.

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