Xerox Develops Secure MicroText Font

Joel Williams Avatar
Joel Williams Avatar

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Xerox Microtext Font (Image courtesy Xerox)By Andrew Liszewski

Scientists working at Xerox have developed a font that’s just 1/100th of an inch high and requires a magnifying glass to read. The ‘MicroText Specialty Imaging Font’ is designed to make important documents with personal info like birth certificates, passports or checks harder to forge.

While most of these documents already contain microtext not visible to the human eye it can only be added through an offset printing process. Something like checks for example then need to be printed again with each customer’s name and account number (via a less elaborate process) and it’s at this step where a lot of fraud can occur. Xerox’s new MicroText font allows the cheaper printers that are typically used to personalise documents like checks and birth certificates to also incorporate micro-printing that is unique to every copy.

So just how small is this font? Well Xerox claims that if a 100-page book were converted to the MicroText font it could easily fit on a single 8.5×11 inch sheet of paper.

[Xerox Microtext Font] VIA [Tech Digest]

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