Bacon Cipher

The Bacon cipher shows up in treasure hunts, ARGs, cryptography history classes and any puzzle where an innocent looking text hides a second message. Every letter becomes a group of five A and B symbols. Type a word and the page returns the groups separated by spaces: BACON comes out as AAAAB AAAAA AAABA ABBBA ABBAB. That is the step before hiding the pattern in upper and lower case, italics, or two similar typefaces.

Francis Bacon's original idea was steganographic rather than cryptographic: the A and B were never meant to be visible, but to become a property of a cover text, such as roman type versus italic type. The output here uses the modern 26-letter variant, where I and J get their own codes, as do U and V. The 1605 version treated each of those pairs as one letter and worked with 24 symbols. There is no variant selector on this page; the table is always the 26-letter one.

Know what vanishes before you type: digits, punctuation, accents and spaces are all stripped. Typing ola mundo! gives eight groups with no mark of where one word ends and the next begins, so keep the word breaks noted elsewhere. Write without accents, since á and ç disappear silently. The page only encodes. To read a string of A and B you split it every five symbols and look each block up by hand. It all runs in the browser, with no text sent out.