How to make an image file of sensitive text information.

The simple way is to write it on a piece of paper and scan it to a gif file. If you do not have a scanner, do it as follows.

The trick is to use Paint, one of the Windows accessories, to make an image file of text. There is nothing to stop you adding the text to an existing picture, but this procedure puts it onto a white background. (You must type mspaint if you use the run command to open Paint.) If you save the image file as a gif it will be very small and open below the text in an email client program. Save it to My Documents for convenience, this is the default folder for attachments in Outlook Express. If you are not using Windows you will surely have image editing software somewhere in your machine, by default. Gimp is a very full featured program that is part of Linux installations. I have no exprience of Mac machines. The basic procedure will be similar for all. The 'Paint' instructions will guide you through the steps.

1. Open "Paint", (with a new image) and click on the "A" (or the link for adding text).
2. Re-size the white page to something suitable by left clicking and dragging the "handles".
   You may have to go to Image|Stretch/Skew and reduce the % value if you cannot see the little square 'handles' at the right.
3. Mark a text box on the page by left clicking and dragging. If the text tool bar does not appear automatically you must add it, from the 'View' drop down menu.
4. Choose a reasonably large font size, say 36, and a fancy type face.
5. Type in the sensitive information and then click outside the box.
6. Go to "File", and "Save As" "anyname.gif" in My Documents.
7. Attach the resulting file to the mail.

The image will be displayed below the text in most mail programs, or it may be opened by any image processing software after downloading from web mail.

This is a useful technique for information which does not need to be, or should not be, processed by a computer. Because the information is presented as a picture it takes a human to understand it. Although there is now software that will do this job (with car number plates!) it would not be used to scan mailed images. It would, in any case, be unable to cope with an ornamental font. With practice one can produce images which can be dropped into Word documents instead of text. I have had it done with my Order Form and was at first very puzzled by my inability to edit the text, which looked perfectly normal.

If you've looked at this page before you may notice that I've changed from jpg to gif and suggested a large size of type. This is the result of receiving an image that defeated me! Compression (especially jpg) produces fuzzy edges and makes some digits very hard to tell apart in some fancy type faces.