This is my favorite post. I discovered something very interesting that I don’t yet want to divulge. When I realized what the steganography is, I did an experiment that gives light to the following things simultaneously:
What the misspellings are, why abscissa was a key word (and you are correct that it is not “cut off”), what k4 is or how it’s used, why palimpsest was a key word, what YA R is, what the extra L in the tableau is, and evidence that the question mark after k3 really does belong to k4. IDBYROWS is no accident at all. In fact, from a “puzzle” perspective, Kryptos has no mistakes. It’s flawless. The “mistakes” or “sloppiness” as Jim once called them are not merely clues to help us along, they are artifacts of a very specific message we’ve already unlocked without even realizing it.
I’ll say more about all this sometime soon. This isn’t k4 syndrome! The best thing I can advise if anyone wants to discover this stuff on their own is to ENCRYPT the plaintext we have using the reverse process used to decrypt them. It’s a very thrilling thing to pay attention to the mistake in k3. That’s one big thing we’ve all been missing, but you have to undo what’s been done to see it. What a great puzzle.
So after all that work, you now have all the pieces you need to go for the solution, which may still be hard to do. I’m doing that with confidence, because the stego becomes obvious when you reverse engineer what has been solved already.