A Micro-Puzzle on French Banknotes Microprinting has been used as an anti-counterfeiting technique on banknotes for many years. Text is printed in a size that is unreadable to the naked eye, but easily visible under light magnification or digital scan at 600dpi. Hand engraving the fine details of any banknote may be tricky, but accurately reproducing microprinted text is virtually impossible. It is easy to recognize a poor print quality, misaligned text, or the fuzzy reproductions made by scanners and printers. Read on...
OMG! That was brilliant and a lovely layout. Very impressive mouse-over zooms. A revelation in text! Hidden quotes and poetic verse! Magnificent.
very nice Dave M! Quite the puzzle lol i have to say i could not read them until you highlited AND pointed out the translations Thanks for the presentatioN!
AAAAA+++++!!!!! Great thread! I couldn't even come close to deciphering the micro-text. Excellent information!
A great write up Dave M! Knew you'd make a wonderful presentation! Good, entertaining, educational, mysterious... it had it all! :hail:
Thanks guys! It was fun to do, the trickiest part was trying to figure out how to display 1200dpi images in a way folks could see them. Camlov2, that's an interesting question. I suppose it could be that someone proposed putting the quotes in normal sized font, but was outvoted because from a design perspective it would be a bit messy, and so they agreed that using it in the microprint instead? Dave
I think it's because the French love a bit of mystery. ;-) Great research, Dave M! I spotted a few recognizable words in the jumble, too, but I'm not sure I would have had the patience to parse it out as you did. Well done!
Hiding the scrambled quote is an additional layer of security. I was able to spot words but don't have sufficient enough French grammar skills to have reconstructed the quote. But just learning about this is fascinating to me. I wonder, was this feature publicly announced or was is something that collectors or people in the security engraving industry discovered after the notes were released.
DaveM.. What a great presentation! Thank you for filling in for lettow. 10 thumbs up in my book. Best regards, Rick
As I say, I have not found this feature described in the French specialized catalogs (mine is a bit old, so it may be in the newer ones), or anywhere online. The only online links I've found to these hidden quotes are links to my site. I can't imagine I'm the first to uncover them, but it does surprise me that there seems to be nothing publicly documented already. Dave
