Re: Seriation

On 01/02/2025 12:19, Stefan Claas wrote:
<snip>

IIRC when encoding with Umlauts etc. at the same position
the original Umlauts will be shown.

Yes. By design, SCOS and SCOS2 preserve not only whitespace but anything else they have not been told how to process[1]. We have seen aob come a cropper by making whitespace significant in Usenet ciphertexts, and that was precisely the problem I was guarding against, but it also makes sense only to digest text it knows about and pass through unmodified everything it doesn't, thus making copy-and-paste ciphertext in an ASCII medium Just Work.

This should be not
the case IMHO.

It is of course your prerogative to disagree with my design, but it is likewise my prerogative to prefer a deliberately ASCII-only design for use in an ASCII environment such as Usenet.
I like bananas. You prefer pears. Great! By all means eat pears. But I'll stick to bananas, thanks.
[1] It would be simple enough to make it understand /everything/, but to do so requires departing from a printable ciphertext the same size as its printable plaintext, could make the algorithm significantly harder to crack from ciphertext only (and thus work to defeat the whole point of the exercise), and might even (as in your example, which I did look at BTW) result in a non-ASCII source file.
--
Richard Heathfield
Email: rjh at cpax dot org dot uk
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999
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