Plotting your Z32 Solution easily using Microsoft Word - Zodiac Cipher Mailings & Discussion

RE: Plotting your Z32 Solution easily using Microsoft Word

shaqmeister — Fri, 22 May 2026 22:22:10 +0000

As an alternative to plotting candidate solves manually using some such unsuited application as Microsoft Word, if your skill-set permits it, it can be helpful to hack together a script (Python, for example) to do the plotting for you. I have been recently playing around with just this approach using matplotlib in a Jupyter Notebook. This has led to some success, although the coding, I can be sure, is not pretty, nor likely efficient. I have, all the same, been able to set up and calibrate a polar coordinate system over the Phillips 66 and position this so that it centres on Diablo, is re-oriented with 0 at the top and angles going clockwise, and scaled appropriately to inches on the map whilst accounting also for the magnetic declination. With all this in place, it is then straightforward and quick just to plot candidates via their coordinates, and display them on the map along with labels.

Here's the output from my most recent example, which took a number of random candidate solutions and applied a straight-to-map plotting to them.

phillips_z32_plots.png

RE: Plotting your Z32 Solution easily using Microsoft Word

shaqmeister — Tue, 12 May 2026 01:18:45 +0000

This takes us, for this example, to somewhere in the region of West Portal in San Francisco, roughly.

For whatever reason, likely simple carelessness, the scaling was not accurately deduced when rendering this first example. With the appropriate degree of precision applied, we should have arrived at the following for "at four and a third inches, radian eight":

66_plot_4_and_a_3rd_on_8.jpg

RE: Plotting your Z32 Solution easily using Microsoft Word

lendor.77 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:59:21 +0000

Avevo in mente anche un valore compreso tra 16° e 17° Est, e in pratica nessuno dei due è davvero sbagliato.

Se ricordo bene, il valore più preciso è intorno ai 16,3°, quindi si tratta semplicemente di un arrotondamento. Seguendo il tuo ragionamento (che il cifrario dovrebbe essere decifrato "manualmente") come avrebbe potuto fare lo stesso Zodiac, quella differenza di un grado è a mio parere facilmente trascurabile, dato il livello di precisione della mappa.

È inoltre opportuno tenere presente che la croce sul Monte Diablo è piuttosto irregolare, quindi quel grado in più può essere ragionevolmente regolato in entrambe le direzioni senza influenzare significativamente il risultato finale.

RE: Plotting your Z32 Solution easily using Microsoft Word

shaqmeister — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 13:09:22 +0000

Just a quick request for anyone who is around to see this.

When considering the instruction on the Phillips Map to align to magnetic north, I have always used 17° east for the magnetic declination in the Bay Area around 1970. However, I cannot remember where I would have sourced this from specifically, and I have seen some people using a value of 16°, from time to time.

Is anyone willing to offer a source for whichever value they are using, since even 1° over the width of the Phillips Map can make a significant difference to where we are ultimately pointing?

Thanks.

RE: Plotting your Z32 Solution easily using Microsoft Word

shaqmeister — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:06:25 +0000

Again, this might initially be felt to be an unsatisfyingly broad result. However, as noted above, we only have (as data) the features of the Phillips Map to work with, and can ultimately do nothing other than to accept the limitations imposed on us.

RE: Plotting your Z32 Solution easily using Microsoft Word

shaqmeister — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:52:56 +0000

From the surrouding features that we can find present on the sparse Phillips map, we can then identify our broad search area as lying in Vallejo, bounded roughly by the Sonoma Boulevard to the West, Curtola Parkway to the South, the I80 to the East and something like Nebraska Street to the North.

That is, from the rough data given, our search boundary in DMW's example would be something like:

search_region_dmw.jpg

RE: Plotting your Z32 Solution easily using Microsoft Word

shaqmeister — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:45:29 +0000

From these steps, we reach a result as below:

dmw_plot_02.jpg

RE: Plotting your Z32 Solution easily using Microsoft Word

shaqmeister — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:42:30 +0000

To plot this example we need, as detailed in DMW's paper, a clockwise angle from straight up of 317° and a vector length of 3.375′′, according to the given map scale. Thus, we adjust our standard inch arrow like so:

dmw_plot_01.jpg

RE: Plotting your Z32 Solution easily using Microsoft Word

shaqmeister — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:37:52 +0000

To run a further example, this time using an actual proposed solution, we can take a look at DMW's proposal from 2019 (see here), which gave us:

IN THREE AND THREE EIGHTHS RADIANS TEN

from:

z32_plaintext_dmw_2019.jpg

RE: Plotting your Z32 Solution easily using Microsoft Word

coder1987 — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:23:38 +0000

Microsoft Word sucks