This is a puzzle about the font Helvetica. It consists of a short rant about how Helvetica is only an okay font, describing some of its flaws. Which, font geeks will recognize, really describe flaws in Arial, the crappy knock-off of Helvetica included with Microsoft Windows instead of the genuine article. And some of those flaws are evident in the text, like the inconsistent angles of the ends of strokes, while others are not, like the terrible slanted leg on “R”.

A closer look will pretty quickly confirm that the text is a mix of Helvetica and Arial. How does one encode information in such a mix? The classic answer is to use Bacon’s cipher, created by Francis Bacon in 1605, as mildly clued by the flavor text’s reference to Shakespeare and use of I for J and V for U, and by the puzzle text’s grouping of characters into groups of five by alternating black and grey colors.

Bacon’s cipher is famous because, according to many conspiracy theorists, Bacon used different typefaces to hide proof in Shakespeare’s plays that he was their real author. The cryptographers and cryptanalysts Elizebeth Smith Friedman and William Friedman got their start, in part, poring over Shakespeare folios for Elizabeth Wells Gallup, trying to prove the Baconian theory of Shakespeare authorship. They became convinced that the theory was wrong and wrote a book explaining why. All this history and more is recounted in the fascinating book The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies. Additionally, many of Smith Friedman’s papers are available here from the Internet Archive. For instance, here’s a page purporting to decrypt one folio.

The original form of Bacon’s cipher involves using two fonts, designated “A” and “B.” Figuring out which font is used for each character (ignoring spaces) is easy for some characters and difficult for others, since some of the differences are especially subtle. (For instance, the periods in Helvetica and Arial have different aspect ratios: the Arial periods are perfect squares, while Helvetica’s are slightly taller than wide.) But between the high-resolution image available if you click on the text and some work with incomplete information, it should be possible to decode the cipher. (The image was generated using the Mac system versions of Helvetica and Arial, though different versions of the fonts will vary slightly. But the inherent design features of the two fonts are distinct enough that they should be distinguishable even from other versions.)

If you decode the cipher (with “A” naturally corresponding to Arial and using Bacon’s original code, in which I/J and U/V are identified—as clued in the flavor text), you get ANSWER IS FULL NAME OF THIS CIPHERS CREATOR. That clues the puzzle answer, FRANCIS BACON.

Characters in Helvetica in the original text are marked in red:

Helvetica is only an okay font. Why are the ends of different strokes cut off at random angles instead of being consistent? Why is the leg on “R” just an awkward slant instead of a nice curve? So much for Swiss precision.

(The idea for this puzzle came when one of the authors, mocking up a draft layout for town pages, made up a bunch of fake puzzle titles, including “Helvetica is Only an Okay Font.” One of the editors then said we had to make it a real puzzle.)