Cryptographic Postage Indicia

[Norbert Preining]

Hi Jonathan,

Happy New Year!

> In a puzzle recently I came across the strange word INDICIA. It provides a
> fascinating thread in the long intertwined history of print and mail
> delivery, and belongs to the subject of philately.

;-)

> In the old days of the last century indicia was a marking (but not an

Not only then, even now. It is commonly used in many places around the
world, like Europe and Japan (those I know ;-).

> TeX comes into the story via a Carnegie Mellon Computer Science Technical
> Report on 1996, whose title is Cryptographic Postage
> Indicia. This document was created using TeX and dvips.
> https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~tygar/papers/Cryptographic_Postage_Indicia/CMU-CS-96-113.pdf

Not that the usage of TeX is related to indicia, though. Tools and
content!

> And today in the UK almost all of the postage stamps have a barcode as the
> indicia, and each stamp has a different barcode. It's that, and optical

Cool, didn't know that. Not in Japan.

I need to look into the pre-paid indication that are usually printed on
New Years cards here (nengajo). Maybe they are easy to copy ...

Thanks for the pointers, very interesting.

Norbert

--
PREINING Norbert                              https://www.preining.info
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