"Sorry no cipher" might be a clue about the 340’s horizontal transposition pattern.

"Sorry no cipher" might be a clue about the 340’s horizontal transposition pattern.

I think that associating this message with the diagonal transposition of Z340 (as you once suggested) is far less likely than my interpretation: this ignores the number of characters, the actual words of the Zodiac, and his vertical sentence, focusing instead (if I understand correctly) only on the angle of his nearly horizontal sentence. And Zodiac wasn’t big on nice horizontal lines…

But I suspect you are right that the transposition of Z340 (then unsolved for nearly a year) was hinted in the same card. As I wrote yesterday in my other post, both Z340 and Z13 (any maybe even Z32) transpositions seem embedded in the ZF symbol appearing on the Halloween envelope+card, using evenly spaced points (which are much more suitable for this purpose than slanted text). 

Does anyone know of a high-resolution scan of this “sorry no cipher” message? The relevant “o” (in the upward “no”) seems a bit smeared in the low-resolution versions I found online, and it’s hard to tell if it might be somehow emphasized or distorted.

The fairly high-resolution image here suggests a somewhat awkward central "o". It’s not too different from the upper left "o", but perhaps Zodiac did emphasize it, e.g. by drawing small cross-hairs slightly sticking out; it’s hard for me to tell without a better image:

Either way, this "sorry no cipher" hint seems more elegant than other Zodiac clues and ciphers, which are littered with mistakes and ambiguities. The message here appears at first bizarre in several respects: Why write the same twice? Why the X? Why the awkward phrasing? Why is he sorry? Why suddenly address the absence of ciphers after ignoring it previously? Are the 13 characters related to Z13, or just coincidental? And why not a more symmetric intersection between sentences? But then, after figuring out what the message means, these issues resolve simultaneously (e.g. a symmetric intersection at the "o" would render the puzzle too easy). This is why I think that here we can reject one interpretation in favor of another, based on the number of pieces fitting in. Another piece that was bothering me falls in place with the above interpretation – Zodiac indeed introduced a redundant "e" in the middle of Z13, as we thought – thus strengthening both "sorry no cipher" and Z13 solutions. And we again see that Zodiac was indeed trying to get his ciphers solved and appreceated, which is encouraging in regards to Z32.

Incidentally, the ZF symbol puzzle is also quite elegant if interpreted as follows, especially if Z32 does turn out to fit in:

           Z340 = knight
         O ➡ O    move
Z32?   ⬈       ⬊
     O ⬅  ⬅  ⬅ O
      Z13 = 3 left

Interestingly, the diagonal Z32 transposition in this interpretation is consistent with the strange structure of Z32. A diagonal transposition requires at least two rows, and can explain the 17+15 row split chosen for the text: Zodiac could not symmetrically split 16+16, as this transposition would close on itself after covering only half the symbols.

Elegance aside, both "sorry no cipher" and the ZF symbol are unfriendly puzzles, like Z340, in the sense that they are very difficult to solve without already knowing a big piece of the solution: finding the "e" padding in Z13, two of the transposition jumps in the ambiguous ZF symbol, and the erratic reading rules in Z340.

Another point RE "sorry no cipher": the redundant "e" in Z13 seems deliberate, and in any case I doubt Zodiac was truly sorry about it… So why did he write a surprising "sorry" instead of something more characteristic, like "I give", "I send","I post","Here’s", etc.? Perhaps he was advising that Z13 consists of only two words (as I assumed here).