Abstract:Ink analysis is an important part of material evidence analysis in forensic science. It not only needs to acquire data by precise chemical analysis instruments, but also needs to parse data by the chemometrics methods such as principal component analysis (PCA), cluster analysis (CA), artificial neural networks (ANN) and pattern recognition and so on. The main applications of chemometrics in ink synthesis, including experimental design and optimization, signal processing, multivariate calibration, pattern recognition, database technology and expert system, have been reviewed. Furthermore, future trends of ink analysis are prospected.