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From: Richard Heathfield <rjh@cpax.org.uk>
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Subject: Re: Seriation
Date: Sat, 1 Feb 2025 12:53:00 +0000
Organization: Fix this later
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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
Sig line 4 vacant - apply within