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

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/opensource by /u/ChronicRhyno on 2026-08-04 17:18:09+00:00.

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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.

github.com/ChronicRhyno/ColorSpace

Code is GPLv3, and the whitepaper is CC BY-ND 4.0