Study On The Application Of The Features Of Word Processors In Examination Of Printed Documents

The computer has become an important tool for the production activities in China. Printed documents which edited through computer software and output on the paper through printers have been taking place of the handwritten documents and become the main form of office documents because they are simple and fast to produce. At the same time, the number of judicial identification cases involving printed documents has gradually increased. The production process of printed documents includes two stages which is editing electronic document and outputting through the printer. As handwriting on written documents reflects the characteristics of the writer and the writing tool, the ink mark on the printed documents reflects the characteristics of the editing software and the printer. However, in the past, the researches on the characteristics of printed documents used to focus on the printer, rarely included the editing software. Because of lack of comprehensive research on printed documents, the cause of some characteristic of printed documents is unknown. For instance, the uncertainty of the cause of the difference of line spacing on the document makes it hard to tell whether the document is forged or not. The common office software includes: word processor, spreadsheet application, and slide show presentation program and graphics editor. Printed documents needed to be tested in forensic practice are mostly text file without pictures. So this paper takes the common word processors as the object and study their features and their application in examination of printed documents.This paper consists of three chapter. The first chapter describes the concept of common word processors, and determines the range of word processors according to the result of the survey ofthe usage of different word processors. Although there is a wide variety of word processors, only a few are often used in daily office word. In this chapter, first, a statistics of the usage level of different word processors is carried out, the whether a word processor is a common one is decided according to the result of the statistics. The second chapter exposes the characteristics of different common word processors and their unique editing effects, in order to discover the methods of the application of the features of common word processors in printed documents examination.Currently there is little difference among the word processors in the types of editing functions,which include text, paragraph and page format setting, but there are personalized differences between different series of word processors in the specific functions, and there are continuous optimizations between different versions of the same series of word processors. The differences among the common word processors in the functions and editing effects are summarized through comparative study. And the value of its application in examination of printed documents is confirmed according to its uniqueness and stability. The third chapter expounds how to distinguish features on the printed documents are caused by the word processor or forging. In judicial practice,it usually is confusing to distinguish the traces of forgery from the traces of word processors editing, which seriously affected appraisers’ judgements, and even lead to the occurrence of misjudgment. It needs summarizing the differences of forging traces and editing traces by experimental study to provide reliable methods avoiding misjudgment.This paper discusses the application of the features of common word processors in examination of printed documents by analyzing the unique functions and the editing effects of common word processors and comparing the forgery traces and editing traces, expecting to benefit examination of printed documents...