Fonts for Forensics

Like other latent evidence that cannot be directly perceived by people, bit sequences have to be presented through tools. Presentations of digital forensic evidence often involve the presentation of text versions of bit sequences representing traces of events that took place within digital systems. This paper is about creating fonts for the examination and presentation of particular classes of bit sequences presented in particular ways in legal situations. Unlike fonts used for other purposes, fonts for forensics are less about the beauty of the presentation and more about the tradeoff between readability and being definitive about what is present. In other words, what you see is what you get, rather than what you see is what looks nice.