You can OCR if you're using a Latin script with few if any accent marks. Depending on your OCR engine, I suppose you could do Cyrillic too. Other scripts, not so much. (And yes, I'm a computational linguist, so we deal with non-Roman scripts all the time, particularly Arabic script. But I suppose that's not a problem for most people here :-).)

There might be some Latin script fonts that cause problems, but I haven't looked into that very much--I do recall we had problems with an italic font.

When I came across this I already had a pristine copy of the font, so I just compared the program for each character to determine the mapping. (I was automating the decoding.) I agree that there is little to no security there.

But the point that I was not so clearly trying to make was that sometimes the messed up encoding is intentional and not a bug.