Call of Cthulhu 7th Ed - Unreadable Handouts

This came up as an interesting question. A handout was written in cursive, but the Player (not the PC, but the Player) born in the digital age wasn't able to read the handout. Cursive was unfamiliar to the Player and apparently, some schools have stopped teaching cursive. As an aside, how do you sign checks and legal documents then? Digitally?

For the above case, the PC would be able to read the document. So, the GM should have had prepared an easy to read version of the handout. Problem solved.

But this brought up a more interesting question. How hard should handouts be to read and should you do this deliberately?

In more than one published scenario, I found the cursive font used was impossible to read. So, what should you do?

1. You can give out the handout, but on the back use an alternative font like Times-Roman that's more readable. That way, you keep the flavor of the handout, but make the life of your Players easier as the handout was a reward and was meant to help the Players advance in the investigation.

2. You tell the Players that's what you get and if you don't want to read the clue, that's tough. Sort of fun the first time, but when no one reads the clues, why hand them out? Or they spend half an hour trying to read it and everyone but one Player gives up. This isn't fun as everyone winds up just hanging around chatting or on their phones waiting for that one Player to figure it out.

3. Make them roll English (or the foreign language) skill. If they succeed, give them the alternate font version. If in English, every PC would roll and most likely one will succeed. This is sort of fun the first time, but do you want to do this every time for every clue? This works more for handouts written in a foreign or archaic language. Again, you expect the PCs to figure this out, otherwise you wouldn't have made a handout for this. I can see a scenario where there's a ticking clock, so the PCs must decide where to spend their time and getting a translation which might help them in the end would eat up their time. I've seen PCs hire a language expert to do the translation while they follow other leads. Of course, sometimes the translator either goes insane, gets mugged, or refuses to translate after a few pages.

4. Give them the alternate version, but for words that are questionable put various interpretations. Such as "The sacrifice requires [flood/fool/foal/foul/soul] to banish ye beastie." I think this would be fun to do and further clues or research would help clarify the ambiguous word or phrase.

Lots of options, I generally just do option #1.