Please don't confuse handwriting identification with handwriting analysis [graphology]. Handwriting identification is a science; handwriting analysis is considered by many people to be a pseudoscience. Handwriting identification attempts to decide who did, or sometimes who did not, write a particular document; handwriting analysis attempts to discern the personality traits of the person who did the writing.
Handwriting identification looks at many factors, some of them conscious but many of them so habitual they are totally beyond conscious control. These include the slant of the letters, the way the letters are joined or separated, the use of capitals in place of small letters and vice versa, the shapes of individual letters, the shapes of buckles on letters such as K, the tails of letters such as Y and J. What the professional handwriting examiner looks at and what the amateur hoping to identify handwriting looks at are often totally different; therefore, what an amateur may think is an exact replica of someone's signature may, to a handwriting examiner, betray dozens of major points of difference…
When a questioned signature is absolutely identical with a known signature, it is likely to be a tracing, which can almost always be identified microscopically by the types of hesitations that do not occur in fluent natural handwriting.
Anne Wingate, Ph.D., Science of the Crime, 1992
Handwriting identification looks at many factors, some of them conscious but many of them so habitual they are totally beyond conscious control. These include the slant of the letters, the way the letters are joined or separated, the use of capitals in place of small letters and vice versa, the shapes of individual letters, the shapes of buckles on letters such as K, the tails of letters such as Y and J. What the professional handwriting examiner looks at and what the amateur hoping to identify handwriting looks at are often totally different; therefore, what an amateur may think is an exact replica of someone's signature may, to a handwriting examiner, betray dozens of major points of difference…
When a questioned signature is absolutely identical with a known signature, it is likely to be a tracing, which can almost always be identified microscopically by the types of hesitations that do not occur in fluent natural handwriting.
Anne Wingate, Ph.D., Science of the Crime, 1992
And these days, an absolutely identical signature is likely to be a digitized signature. Thus, a genuine signature placed on a spurious document. It's very easy to do. I demonstrated at a forensic document examination conference how to create a $500,000 check in 5 minutes.
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