Skip Text

We illustrate skip text first by example. Consider the following text.

The first principle in thinking is knowing what you know and knowing what you do not know. For when you think you know and you really do not know, you have put yourself in limitation. And the thinking you do will be constrained because of what you do not know that you need to know or it will be constrained because you do not realize that what you think you know is actually incorrect.

We take this text and remove punctuation and spaces and lay it out in rows of 20 successive characters each. This is shown below.

Thefirstprincipleint
hinkingisknowingwhat
youknowandknowingwha
tyoudonotknowForwhen
youthinkyouknowandyo
ureallydonotknowyouh
aveputyourselfinlimi
tationAndthethinking
youdowillbeconstrain
edbecauseofwhatyoudo
notknowthatyouneedto
knoworitwillbeconstr
ainedbecauseyoudonot
realizethatwhatyouth
inkyouknowisactually
incorrectaaaaaaaaaaa

Now if we scan down the first column, we get the first skip text: Thytyuatyenkarii. The second skip text is from the second column: hioyorvaodonienn and so on.

Formally, for a given skip s, an N character text T=(t1,...,tN) has s skip texts T_1,T_2,...,T_s given by

T1=(t1,t1+s,t1+2s,...)
T2=(t2,t2+s,t2+2s,...) ,...,
Ts=(ts,t2s,t3s,...,)