How much work to write an enciphered manuscript v one with complex meaningless text?

[Mark Knowles]

The subject seems to me so simple that I see no possibility of confusion.

I wrote that copying a text with a simple cipher and writing nonsense require the same amount of effort: basically the manual effort of materially putting the characters on the sheet using pen and quill. Anton added the scenario in which you create meaningful content: this requires a mental effort that is not needed in the other two cases.

In other words:
1) Write a page of meaningless characters: let's say about one hour.
2) Copy one page with a simple cipher: same as above (about one hour). You need to familiarize with the cipher, but we are discussing writing a whole manuscript, so the overhead is negligible.
3) Write a page of meaningful text: the minimum is as above (about one hour) if you write whatever comes to mind; but this can take much longer, possibly days, if the text is highly complex and original.

As RobGea wrote You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., the difference between (1) and (2) is that if the text is meaningless it cannot be deciphered.

If you want a text that cannot be deciphered, (1) is your best option. That is what Kelley (in particular with his first language) and Serafini did.

If you want to convey a message, (2) makes sense, if some privacy or display of cryptographic skill is a concern (as in Fontana's case); whenever there are no such concerns, plain text is used.

My question is based on the thought as to whether it makes sense for the author to have consciously produced text which was deliberately totally meaningless or whether he/she could have achieved their same goal by producing an enciphered text copied from elsewhere, if say the manuscript was some kind of hoax.

If it required the same effort, so there was not extra effort involved in producing a meaningless text than a difficult to decipher text, what could be the purpose in producing a specifically meaningless text. If the author used some mechanism like a cardan grille then it may not be much effort to produce meaningless text, but I think the evidence counts against the hypothesis that it was produced by some mechanism of that kind.