Documents of any kind may need to be examined in both a business or a domestic case.

It is often that we need to examine a document after it was handwritten, but we do not have the original at hand. If we have access to the paper below the written document, we can recover the content using a device called ESDA (photo on the right). ESDA stands for  Electrostatic Detection Apparatus.  In our experimenting, we can retrieve handwritten text on normal paper, up to 5 sheets of paper below, especially if that was written by pencil or a ball point pen.

Strathclyde Forensics is using outsourced laboratory infrastructure and its own expertise to recover handwritten or typed (with a mechanic typing machine) documents.

Another method of studying documents is the VSC4 apparatus. VSC stands for Video Spectral Comparator. This device allows us to analyse documents such as bank cheques, counterfeit bank notes and other documents under different lights (ultra violet, infra red) and different filters.

This analysis can display what kind of alterations a document has suffered, and also display watermarks and other identification marks on bank notes.