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dteviot edited this page Jan 1, 2026 · 1 revision

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How to unscramble ChrysanthemumGarden

When reading Epubs created from https://chrysanthemumgarden.com, you will find gibberish text between normal words and sentences. This is because the site uses multiple substitution cyphers. The text is unscrambled by the browser using custom fonts. And I think they keep generating new cyphers.

To obtain the decryption keys needed to unscramble an epub.

  1. When you open EpubEditor,
  2. BEFORE you click 'clean Chyrsanthemum Garden', Open the Chrome Dev tools and go to the Console tab.
  3. Click 'clean Chyrsanthemum Garden"
  4. On the console tab you should now see something like the image below. Make a note of the red lines with the text "Unknown cypher" (note, you might need to scroll up, they will probably be at the top of the list)
image
  1. Unzip the epub. In the \OEBPS\Fonts folder there will be a set of woff2 files with the same name as the cyphers.
image
  1. You can then look at the fonts for the unknown cyphers with a font viewer such as https://opentype.js.org/glyph-inspector.html e.g. This is what you see if you load the file Degoefaiuy.woff2
image
  1. From this, you can get the decode key for the "Degoefaiuy" cypher. e.g. From SwordShadesOfSunset's post, he gave the decode key for this cypher as
decrypt("lMiDtBgoaKXzIhdLfGjQScPbTEHNemZkCxuRFUqvnJwsVyOrWYAp", "span[style*='Degoefaiuy']");

Basically, you take the letters from boxes 27 to 52, then the letters from boxes 1 to 26.

Once you have the decode key, you just add it to the rest of the keys in the script https://github.com/dteviot/EpubEditor/blob/master/mutators/chrysanthemumgarden-UnscrambleTextV2.js

And ideally, post it to https://github.com/dteviot/WebToEpub/issues/2173 for others to use.

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