Bacon's cipher

Any method of writing the message that allows two distinct representations for each character can be used for the Bacon Cipher.

Bacon himself prepared a Biliteral Alphabet[5] for handwritten capital and small letters with each having two alternative forms, one to be used as A and the other as B.

The word 'steganography', encoded with quotation marks, where standard text represents "typeface 1" and text in boldface represents "typeface 2": To encode a message each letter of the plaintext is replaced by a group of five of the letters 'A' or 'B'.The pattern of standard and boldface letters is: ba aabbaa b aaabaaa abba aaaaaa bb aaa bbabaabba ba aaaaaaaa ab b baaab bb babb ab baa abbaabb 'b' bb 'b'.This decodes in groups of five as baaab(S) baaba(T) aabaa(E) aabba(G) aaaaa(A) abbaa(N) abbab(O) aabba(G) baaaa(R) aaaaa(A) abbba(P) aabbb(H) babba(Y) bbaaa bbaab bbbbbwhere the last three groups, being unintelligible, are assumed not to form part of the message.

Typographical analysis of the First Folio shows that a large number of typefaces were used, instead of the two required for the cipher, and that printing practices of the time would have made it impossible to transmit a message accurately.

[6] The Friedmans' tombstone included a message in Bacon's cipher not spotted for many years.