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So the early
Baconian cipher hunters were challenged with these inconsistencies in cases
when they were quite sure that the larger context indicated a cipher. Since
ciphers and numerical signatures were common, as will be shown, they
hypothesized that, if invariable rules had been adopted in the ciphers, that
then “numerical signatures could not have escaped observation”. In their
research paragraph word counts worked primarily when counting words that were
in the kind of type that was used for the majority of the printed matter.
Normally this would be Roman type. There are other instances though when only
Italicized words are counted or only capitalized words or letters. Letter
counts in a line of text seem to always use both Roman and Italic type, and double
letters (those not clearly separated) would count as one letter. Unusually
sized letters may be treated differently than the surrounding text. So,
superscripts may not be counted at all, and extra large letters present
opportunities for additional enciphering. The letter ‘W’ was often written with
two ‘V’s and in these cases each separated ‘V’ is counted in letter counts.
They also did not think that there was an absolute rule about hyphenated words,
and concluded that it may have been left up to the ingenuity of the decipherer
to count them as 1 or 2 (or sometimes more) words. The numbers in years are
invariably added separately to arrive at a reduced figure. The same appears to
be true for an age. All this ambiguity makes it more difficult for the decipherer
to determine if a cipher is indeed present. Most of the time the above
ambiguities will not be an issue for the examples in this paper. And a couple
times when it might be will be discussed at that time.
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