The gallows intrusion, the baseline jumps and multipass

[Anton]

Let's discuss the BTT opportunity. In fact, in some portions the text looks as if written bottom-to-top. In some portions, it looks like written top-to-bottom.

The question is, could all the text have been written BTT?

The first point in discussing that would be: what for? The answer is simple, to introduce additional layer of protection. One may argue that that provides very little protection, but, at the same time, writing words backwards was widely spread in medieval ciphers, however easy it's to detect that. So I can't see why one would not undertake writing the whole text backwards, only on line-by-line basis.

Let's see how that could be done. Suppose I have the following source text:

Code:

this is the first line of this most informative text which is excitingly interesting for you the reader and as you can see it is splendidly illustrated notwithstanding that it contains just nonsense and I will bet you are already tired to read all this but this is the sixth line and so just deal with it and this is the ending line of this text which is so long that is spans two lines

Suppose that the full line of this text fills the available width of the folio.

Now, I can rewrite this in the following way:

Code:

long that is spans two lines and this is the ending line of this text which is so but this is the sixth line and so just deal with it and I will bet you are already tired to read all this notwithstanding that it contains just nonsense and as you can see it is splendidly illustrated which is excitingly interesting for you the reader this is the first line of this most informative text

In this I will betray myself with that the first line is shorter than others. So I could fill it up to the end with some filler. But then all my lines of text will be full lines which is in itself suspicious. So I could be more cunning, and instead make it thus:

Code:

line of this text which is so long that is spans two lines line and so just deal with it and this is the ending already tired to read all this but this is the sixth it contains just nonsense and I will bet you are it is splendidly illustrated notwithstanding that interesting for you the reader and as you can see of this most informative text which is excitingly this is the first line

In an attempt to be steganographic, I could practice something like this:

Code:

long that is spans two lines line of this text which is so it and this is the ending line and so just deal with this but this is the sixth already tired to read all and I will bet you are it contains just nonsense notwithstanding that it is splendidly illustrated reader and as you can see interesting for you the text which is excitingly of this most informative this is the first line

which would occupy only half of the folio width, and then fill in another source text to the right of this one line-by-line (or, rather, half-line-by-half-line) in the similar fashion, thus effectively merging two "columns" in one occypying the full width.

(To be continued...)