Printing or engraving or other techniques and resulting security documents can help inhibit or prevent tampering or forgery, such as by providing a strikethrough path through characters in a word. A characteristic of the strikethrough path can depend upon a characteristic of the word. For example, the strikethrough path can alternatingly ascend and descend through successive words in a sequence, such that the location of the strikethrough path within a particular character depends on that particular character, upon a location of the character within the word, or both. The strikethrough path can be constructed such that if characters are copied or excised and re-arranged, such re-arrangement is evident by misalignment of one or more portions of the strikethrough path that would otherwise be aligned in the original document.