method for the detection of concealed text and its use in approval of electronic documents

摘要

The present invention is a method for detecting whether or not hidden text is present in a document during an electronic approval process. The method of the present invention will use the hidden text query of an application that supports such a query to examine the document for the presence of hidden text, and present the user with a number of options should hidden text be detected, such as delete the information, display it, or stop the approval process. The method also can be used with applications which do not support hidden text queries, and the presence of hidden text will be determined by comparing the background color with the text color. If they are the same, the presence of hidden text is assumed. Alternatively, the method of the present invention can also be used to ignore special kinds of hidden text, such as dynamic manifestation of data, which is hidden text that can be entered at the time of signing. Such hidden text will be preferably delimited with delimiters, and the method of the present invention will ignore any hidden text so delimited.