A method embeds a message into a document containing a set of glyphs. Individual glyphs in the document, groups of glyphs in the document, or the entire document are represented using a distance field that includes distance values from the shapes of interest. Each symbol of the message is represented as modifications of a subset of the distance values in the distance field. This subset of the distance values in the distance field is modified according to modification to produce a modified glyph in a modified document, wherein the symbol in the message is embedded in the modified glyph.