Obfuscated text export?

Literature & Writing NaNo Materials
1

I’m new to Scrivener, so if I’m missing the obvious just tap me on the shoulder :slight_smile: Is there a way to export your draft as obfuscated text for #nanowrimo importing? Thanks!

2

There is no automatic way of doing this. The easiest way to do it is to export your Draft and then use TextEdit or something to search and replace a few of the most common letters. You should end up with something close to gibberish without upsetting the word count in a few iterations.

3
  1. export to a text file (assume this is ~/Documents/Opus.txt
  2. open terminal
  3. type following at prompt.
perl -pi bak -e 'tr/aeioustrh/zxvbjaeiou/' ~/Documents/Opus.txt

That will replace the left characters with the right (a -> z, e -> x, etc) in Opus.txt and create Opus.txt.bak which will be the original file. If there is a pile o’ interest I can wrap this in a little apple script that and make it drop-able.

4

And for the purists, yes tr/// and y/// are identical. I like tr/// as it is wider known in my circles of “old unix hacks”. Some habits die hard and slow.

5

Bah, of course there’s a perl solution!! (though for that matter, now that the cold medicine’s starting to clear, just as simple would have been a sed - sed -ie “y/akeioustrh/zxvbjaeiou/” . Thanks for the reminder of the simpler things! :smiley:

6

sed works too. I have a tendency to use perl as my “simple” solutions inevitable wind up with creep. “we need to obfuscate” turns into “we need to obfuscate with a shifting pattern” morphs into “and insert word usage into a DB” which then become “and put it on the net with authentication, adds, and the ability to provide premium content to paying users”. sed starts to have trouble in there somewhere.

7

How would you do this in Windows? I’m hoping to use Scrivener for Windows this year.

ducks the rotten consumables heading in her direction

8

What I would do for Windows is just take your word count, note it down, and then start mass copy and pasting the word ‘the’ (or what have you) into a text file until the word count in that file is equal to the original manuscript. Then submit the the report.

Or you could install Strawberry Perl on Windows and use the above tricks. :slight_smile:

For an automated solution, I helped someone set up a script that hijacks the MMD exporter with a replacement Perl script which removes all hyphens and a few other things. A similar set-up could produce a gibberish file when compiled. You’d just compile to MMD->LaTeX or something and end up with a mess of a file every time.

Here is the thread.

9

Thanks Ioa. :slight_smile:

10

Active state perl is my preference.

Not really, but cygwin is well beyond “sane” for most people.

May the the “sponsor” could provide a quick interface for users?

11

Cygwin’s kind of nifty. Last time I used it, it couldn’t do much more than run bash or perl, which has definite geek points. :slight_smile:

12

For me it is a full development env for perl/sh/bash. I do a bit of that. Oh, and it works great for X and remote XDM logins.

But again, normal is over ← there.

13

[quote="Jaysen"For me it is a full development env for perl/sh/bash. I do a bit of that. Oh, and it works great for X and remote XDM logins. [/quote]
Cool. Never used to be that robust.

Normal is boring!

14

I guess I ought to update my response in this thread. If you’ve downloaded the NaNoWriMo preview version of Scrivener 2.0, you’ll find included in that version an obfuscation compiler. It’s just a simple plain-text compiler that garbles the output. So you shouldn’t need anything fancy any more.

15

which is why we are here.