Editing Straddling checkerboard (section)

==Cryptographic properties==
'''Compression''': The more common characters are encoded by only one character, instead of two; this reduces the ciphertext size and potentially the cipher's proneness to a [[Frequency analysis|frequency attack]].

'''[[Transposition cipher#Fractionation|Fractionation]]''': Unlike in the [[Polybius Square]] (where every character is represented by a pair of digits), a straddling checkerboard will not encrypt each character with the same number of ciphertext digits. This makes it harder for a cryptanalysts to determine the boundaries between plaintext characters. This may be combined with a [[Transposition cipher|transposition]] (as it is in the [[VIC cipher]]) in order to locate the ciphertext letters of the same plaintext character at unknown locations in the ciphertext.