Curious legal question

[snousle]

Can font and indentation carry legal meaning in a contract? In other words, if you took a document with varying fonts and indentation - implying an outline structure with headings and subheadings - and stripped it of its formatting and white space so as to flatten this structure into a simple list, could that change the document's meaning in a court of law?

Unfortunately, this is not a theoretical question. ;-) It is especially interesting because the text makes more sense without the formatting than with it - the category and subcategory bear no relationship to each other, and it is thus nonsensical when read as an outline.

Comments

[bbearseviltwin.livejournal.com]

This to me would indicate either a badly drawn up or intentionally deceptive document. Hiding provisions so they are difficult to find. I would get a lawyer to go over this closely if you are thinking of signing such an agreement.