A substitution cipher is a pretty basic type of code. You replace every letter with a drawing, color, picture, number, symbol, or another type of letter. This means, if you have your first "E" encoded as a square, all of your other "E"s in the message will also be squares.

This tool has been created specifically to allow for as much flexibility as possible. You'll see what I mean when you start playing with it.

Notes

The "Dancing Men" images are based on the Sherlock Holmes story of The Dancing Men. Only 17 of the 26 letters were shown in the text, and there were inconsistancies between messages. Aage Rieck Sørensen published a paper where he analyzed the dancing men and created a workable alphabet, and needed to slightly change some existing stick figures to make everything work out well. My dancing men are based upon the Dancingmen TrueType font, which is based upon Sørensen's work. If there is a demand, I will use alternate stick men figures, but email me with a key showing the stick men and the arm/leg positions you wish to see.

The "Gold Bug" symbols never had symbols for J, K, Q, X, and Z. In their place, I decided upon the symbols based on others that I saw in the code (there was a ] but not a [ symbol) and what I saw on pictures of old typewriters.

Braille supports upper case, numbers, punctuation, and abbreviations, but "Grade 1" just supports a direct character-for-character translation with number encoding, decimal point vs. period, and left vs. right quote. It does not know how to handle everything – just the most basic things. "Grade 2" allows abbreviations and shorthand, which is beyond the scope of this web page. If you know how to abbreviate Braille, you can enter the shorthand with "Braille - Shorthand" and get the full range of possible Braille symbols.

The Bionicle images are based off the alphabet used by Lego's Bionicle toy line.