Times New ROT13 (and Times New Caesar)

If you’re wondering why the lower line has a load of squigglies when it appears identical to the one above, open the linked PDF and copy some of the text. Looks a bit squiffy, no?

I’m messing with your head here by splitting the encoding of the characters from the appearance of the glyphs, and using the old rot13 cypher to do it. This will really mess up the new MS Office “Edit PDF as text” schtick. Please note I’m doing this for lulz, not to break accessibility; that would be as the kids today say, a dick move.

Here’s the font: TimesNewROT13.

Since Times is both New and Roman, I thought I’d add some old roman by making a Caesar Cypher version. I don’t think I’ve done this quite right, but it works if you use the following shell command as an encoder:

tr '[A-C][D-Z][a-c][d-z]' '[D-Z][A-C][d-z][a-c]'

Here it is: TimesNewCaesar. I’ll fix it soon enough.

(Note that ROT13 fonts have been done before …)

Yours truly, ‰te>a…t

I like epost. I’d like it even more if they hurried up and processed my direct payment ability — which required a form and a void cheque mailed to an address in Toronto — but it’s a pretty good service. I get my bills, viewable and payable online, on the day of issue. No paper. This is good.

This is good because every single filing container I buy eventually ends up full of (paid) bills and financial administrivia. Less paper = less messy Stewart = happy Stewart. Some messes, like my electronics table, could be classed as glorious, however, and therefore joyous in their creation and use. Not all tidiness is good.

So I got my first Visa bill by e-post. Yay! Reviewed it, paid it. No hassle. But since this a PDF facsimile of my bill, something mighty odd has happened to my address:

It’s a perfect substitution cypher of my name and address. I’ve been out of the prepress industry for long enough not to immediately recognize it as a font encoding error. I’m confused why it might have A, T, E & N, but no M. Odd indeed.