I'm a little intimidated by buying train tickets in a foreign country.
Find the right place to go, wait in line, negotiate the right ticket without quite
understanding fare options or the local language, ... So I like
that the Swiss train company lets you buy
and print tickets online. Just pick your journey online, press the
"print" button, and voila, you get a PDF file.
Every conductor I've given one of these to looks at me funny; I guess
they aren't common yet. The ticket has an interesting security
feature, a grey box of random pixels (as seen above). I thought at
first it was some spread spectrum encoding of a bunch of data, but
I think it's really just a simple visual mask hiding a few letters.
Cool that it works through PDF and crappy home printers.
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