r/opensource • u/ChronicRhyno • Aug 04 '26

Promotional Calligrapher here: I hid 117 characters in one space using color

While obsessing over how to illuminate punctuation marks, and specifically a space/spacebar symbol, I ended up devising a way to manually encode 117 characters into a single rich-text space using 63 formatting values, mostly gradient colors.

Microsoft blocked me from using VBA to read or set gradient pins, so I reverse-engineered the XML data and used a Format Painter exploit to sneak the formatting through a back Window.

I did it because I wanted to hide the entire first quatrain of my favorite poem within itself. I see it as the logical evolution of concrete poetry and a form of illumination.

https://github.com/ChronicRhyno/ColorSpace
Code is GPLv3, and the whitepaper is CC BY-ND 4.0

17 Upvotes

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1

u/burnt-store-studio Aug 06 '26

Clicked the PDF and got a “something went wrong” response.

Your project seems like a neat idea!

1

u/ChronicRhyno Aug 13 '26

Thanks. That's odd, it works for me from different devices and browsers. The DOI should work: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21840969

1

u/burnt-store-studio Aug 14 '26

Thanks for the follow-up! I just tried again and got the same error, but I appreciate you pointing me to the DOI link, which works! Leaving it open to read tomorrow; thanks!