Baconian

Francis Bacon created this method of hiding one message within another. It is not a true cipher, but just a way to conceal your secret text within plain sight. The way it originally worked is that the writer would use two different typefaces or font styles. One would be the a typeface and the other would be b. Your message would be written with the two styles intermingled, thus hiding your message within a perfectly normal text.

There are two versions. The first uses the same code for I and J, plus the same code for U and V. The second uses distinct codes for every letter.

For example, let's take the message "Test It" and encode it with the distinct codes for each letter. You get a result like "baabbaabaabaababaabb abaaabaabb". The original message is 6 characters long so the encoded version is characters. An example of this with a 30-character message, using bolded, emphasized letters for the "B" set, it would look like this:

When decoding, it will use "0", "A", and "a" as an a; "1", "B", and "b" are all equivalent as well. Other letters are ignored.

Examples:

• - This is the example from above.
• - The example from The Free Encyclopedia.
• - His initials were hidden in code on his tombstone, which went undiscovered for quite a while.