Forensic vs. Computing writing features as seen by Rex, the intuitive document retriever

The paper reveals the superfi cial matching between script features as understood by forensic experts and computer scientists and advocates the development of computational instruments tailored to fi t the features traditionally used by the forensic community. In particular, and including other areas of graphonomics and the general public, there exists a demand for software for the analysis of intuitive features, think “slant” or “roundness,” as opposed to analytical features, like “Fourier transform” or “entropy.” Rex, a software with such a capability, is introduced and used to explore the potentialities of this approach for script forensics. An investigation of properties of the script contour orientation, the feature used by Rex, is also presented.