Editing Steganography (section)

===Printed===
Digital steganography output may be in the form of printed documents. A message, the ''[[plaintext]]'', may be first encrypted by traditional means, producing a ''[[ciphertext]]''. Then, an innocuous ''cover text'' is modified in some way so as to contain the ciphertext, resulting in the ''stegotext''. For example, the letter size, spacing, [[typeface]], or other characteristics of a cover text can be manipulated to carry the hidden message. Only a recipient who knows the technique used can recover the message and then decrypt it. [[Francis Bacon]] developed [[Bacon's cipher]] as such a technique.

The ciphertext produced by most digital steganography methods, however, is not printable.  Traditional digital methods rely on perturbing noise in the channel file to hide the message, and as such, the channel file must be transmitted to the recipient with no additional noise from the transmission.  Printing introduces much noise in the ciphertext, generally rendering the message unrecoverable.  There are techniques that address this limitation, one notable example being ASCII Art Steganography.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://pictureworthsthousandwords.appspot.com/|title=ASCII Art Steganography|author=Vincent Chu|website=Pictureworthsthousandwords.appspot.com}}</ref>

[[File:HP Color Laserjet 3700 schutz g.jpg|thumb|Yellow dots from a laser printer]]
Although not classic steganography, some types of modern color laser printers integrate the model, serial number, and timestamps on each printout for traceability reasons using a dot-matrix code made of small, yellow dots not recognizable to the naked eye — see [[printer steganography]] for details.