Quote:Did anyone ever manage to use heavily abbreviated stuff that cannot be printed as input for encryption? If not why do we need it? As far as I know 15th century ciphers use only a few of the most common abbreviations.
In the first place, there are researchers who believe that the VMS is exactly that - an input abbreviated in a way that we can't read (yet).
In the second place, we need it for a benchmark. Heavily abbreviated stuff was one of the ways manuscripts were written back then. Instead of that, the VMS has been compared with, and benchmarked against (in terms of character statistics) with King James' Bible, The Origin of the Species, and the like out-of-time texts.
Quote:Thisis probably a stupid suggestion, but might it be possible to take a standard text and artificially mass-introduce abbreviations with find and replace?
As I said, I have done that on a limited scale. I took and introduced 9-s, I think. I believe I have posted the results in the forum.