The Anatomy of Zero-Width Unicode Steganography and AI Text Fingerprinting
The Unicode Standard defines dozens of format and control code points (General Category `Cf` and `Zs`) designed for complex script shaping, bidirectional text control, and invisible word breaking. Characters such as the Zero-Width Space (`U+200B`), Zero-Width Non-Joiner (`U+200C`), Zero-Width Joiner (`U+200D`), and Word Joiner (`U+2060`) occupy 3 bytes in UTF-8 memory yet render with zero horizontal advance width in web browsers and word processors.
Because these code points survive standard Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V clipboard operations across web apps, Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and CMS editors, they are widely used for digital steganography and AI text watermarking. By encoding binary sequences into alternating `U+200B` and `U+200C` characters between words, platforms can invisibly fingerprint documents. Multinook's forensic parser inspects raw code points via `String.prototype.codePointAt()`, exposing and excising every non-printing marker in sub-millisecond time.

