The invention discloses how a text document can be marked through the insertion
of inter-word blank characters for the purpose of becoming authenticateable. First,
text to be marked is edited so as to obtain a canonical form of it conforming to
a model. Then, from this canonical form of the text and a secret-key used as inputs,
a unique combination of inter-word blank characters positions is computed in which
extra blanks are inserted thus, obtaining a marked text document. Authentication
of a received marked text document is performed by a recipient, sharing the secret-key,
further comparing the received text document to the marked text document so that
if they are matching exactly the received text document is accepted as authentic
or rejected as fake if not. The invention allows to merge the information necessary
to authenticate a text document into the body of the document itself which works
as well on soft-copy and hard-copy text documents.