Publisher: Wintertree SoftwareSlaney
Slaney is a cipher font derived from the Dancing Men cipher that was a major plot point in the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” by Arthur Conan Doyle. It is named for the character Abe Slaney, who made considerable use of it.
Slaney consists of four separate forms: Regular is the basic Dancing Men that most are familiar with. Bold is a weathered, pitted version of the same, as if it had been drawn in chalk. Italic is based on the original 1903 publication in the Strand Magazine in the UK. Finally, the Bold Italic style is an outline which looks rather unlike the usual dancing men.
The symbols are not replicas of any specific characters from the original graphics but, rather, compilations of the best and most regular elements of each character for that letter. As only 18 of the possible 26 letters were included in the story, the remaining 8 needed to complete the font have been created from existing characters reversed. In addition, a set of numerals following the original idea of the font, a seemingly childish scrawl, has been created, along with a few elements of punctuation.
The Bold Italic style is perhaps the most unusual, because it looks quite unlike the others. It is an outline style that looks a bit like the undeciphered Rongorongo writing of Rapa Nui. This makes it useful for a wider range of scenarios because the players are less likely to recognize it.
The package includes a manual giving a brief history of the cipher and the design of Slaney, as well as a character chart.
Wintertree’s cryptographic assistant program CRYPTER has a setting to correctly set the capitalization of text so that the characters with flags appear as end-of-word markers.Price: $4.00
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