24 ms·

Dotsies (2012)

460 points by severine 8y ago

newsgremlin 8y ago
Looking at several word examples I find it easy to get letters mixed up, the pixel position difference is quite precise and there's no other indicators to suggest what letter a letter might be if you know what I mean. I'm aware of my own bias of using the language you grew up using i.e. English and the way capitalist society has encouraged its use for the sake of western convienience more than anything. I do think a language that is logogram based would be the more optimum step and agreeable one.
pavel_lishin 8y ago
One advantage of regular letters compared to this is that it's pretty easy to tell that even a fairly mangled A is still an A; a word written in dotsies loses a lot of its legibility as soon as it's not displayed in fairly large pixels across a very clear background. Viewing things at an angle? While it moves by? On a dirty or wet piece of paper? Forget about it. It's a super fun idea, though. I would 100% put this in the background, or even the foreground, of some future scifi scape.
- jdougan 8y ago
  Dotsies is even worse if your eyes are some variant of broken. Nearsighted, cataracts, crosseyed, etc.
  - Koshkin 8y ago
    Perfect for automatic readers though.
    - justinator 8y ago
      Too bad I'm not an automatic reader!
      - pavel_lishin 8y ago
        I've been an automated reader since I was probably, what, five years old?
        ineedasername 8y ago
        Me too, I didn't even mean to read your comment, but as soon as my eyes saw it: boom, processed and read. like a computer without virus scan or security or anything, to see the words was to run their executable on my wetware.
        tigershark 8y ago
        I actually remember to have had severe headaches when I was something like 4 or 5 and I experienced the passage from deliberate reading and automatic reading. It was much worse being around in a car and just looking outside and unwillingly read all the signs because it added also elements of motion sickness to it...
        ineedasername 8y ago
        I saw a great t-shirt at the 2006 HOPE conference that read, "Just by reading this you have given me control of piece of your brain"
    - hannasanarion 8y ago
      Nope: automatic readers rely heavily on redundancy. QR codes are like 20% data, 80% error correction. OCR is still a difficult problem, despite the redundancy built in to the alphabet. There's no way a machine reader could tell apart characters that differ by one pixel
- Semiapies 8y ago
  Yeah, it's a telling point that when we're asked to read passages of Dotsies, the font's sized up least three times (36px to 42px)—and so at least nine times the screen area taken—compared to the base 13px size used in the "How much better is it?" example. You're going to need damn good eyes to read Dotsies at anything like 13px, and I suspect even the sharp-eyed are going to misread a lot. Size Dotsies text up to the point that people of average vision can read it as reliably as a normal font at a reasonable size, and I don't think you're going to get much, if any, greater information density. I'm reminded of Speedtalk, a language from Robert Heinlein's story "Gulf", which had every combination of phoneme and delivery (pitch, length, etc.) represent a word in the Basic English vocabulary. So, every spoken "word" in the language is actually a full sentence. But, it takes intense futuristic training just to be able to speak vaguely intelligibly in it, because all the normal imprecisions of speaking (much less speaking in a new language) take any tiny error from "You used 'record' as a noun, but with a long 'e' and the stress on the second syllable." to "You have a hovercraft, and it's full of what???" Now imagine trying to follow speech in such a language if the speaker's out of breath, alarmed, surrounded by background noise, etc. Just not enough redundancy for reliable communication.
  - Vendan 8y ago
    Eels. My hovercraft is full of eels. http://www.omniglot.com/language/phrases/hovercraft.htm http://www.omniglot.com/language/phrases/hovercraft.htm
    - Semiapies 8y ago
      That's the reference, yes.
- IgorPartola 8y ago
  Not to mention recognizing individual letters. The difference between “a” and “b” in Latin alphabet is drastic. In dotsies you could only tell them apart if other letters near them give you relative height of the dots to some baseline. Dotsies seem to make a tradeoff where they optimize for higher information density at the cost of much higher error rate (or requirement for precision and accuracy if you will). I also definitely see your point about font sizes. Basically it’s a valiant attempt at a reimagined alphabet but I don’t think it actually achieves higher info density in the real world.
ziffusion 8y ago
Is this person completely insane? Or am I just not getting something? In which universe is this font remotely useful?
- Waterluvian 8y ago
  I think the goal is "hey that's neat!"
- lumberjack 8y ago
  It's like DVORAK but for reading. The ambition is noble.
  - snuxoll 8y ago
    DVORAK isn’t useless though, it’s the only reason I was able to learn touch typing.
- BucketSort 8y ago
  I thought this was an obvious prank until I read the comments here... which I also assume to be a part of the prank.
tlb 8y ago
I like the idea of users being able to choose the font they prefer to read in. It's not very hard to do: you could configure your browser and your code editor and maybe Kindle and be able to read in the new font 90% of the time. Can anyone who uses https://www.dyslexiefont.com/ https://www.dyslexiefont.com/ comment on how hard it is to have it everywhere? But Dotsies seems to be solving the wrong problem: using the fewest pixels. I think the right problem is being able to skim large amounts of text quickly, for which typical fonts are pretty good. You can find whether there are any numbers on a page, for instance, in well under a second.
- zimpenfish 8y ago
  I use it (well, OpenDyslexie) as my only font on desktop Firefox and it's been ok for me for a year or thereabouts. I did use it in iOS Pocket as well but they dropped it a while back.
reaperducer 8y ago
About time for an update, no? No. Once again, Silicon Valley "discovers" something that was already invented. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braille https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braille
- nerdponx 8y ago
  How easy it would be to "read" Braille visually, like Dotsies? I imagine they are optimized for different uses, no?
  - mwcampbell 8y ago
    Sighted braille teachers can read braille visually, even upside down, so they can read what's coming out of the student's brailler in real time. I had at least one teacher who could do that. But of course, that's a specialized skill. To judge for yourself how conducive braille is to visual reading, when presented as black on white (or the opposite) instead of raised dots on a page, you can grab a braille font here: https://www.hadley.edu/online_course_font.asp https://www.hadley.edu/online_course_font.asp
- vokep 8y ago
  Yes but that isn't meant for screen space saving or legibility - dotsies is optimizing for both. They could maybe do better on legibility, or maybe it isn't that big a problem...the more I think on it, the more I get where the author was going (and feel they may have successfully reached it, or at least made strong progress)
- dang 8y ago
  This comment breaks the site guidelines. They ask: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." Also: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here.
- the_jeremy 8y ago
vokep 8y ago
I love the way it teaches you, but the other comments are correct. It doesn't really make sense to optimize for screen space like this. However, the teaching style along with a symbol alphabet that IS trying to solve for better legibility (without necessarily any allegiance to dyslexic fonts), could be pretty interesting. In middle school when bored once I made my own symbolic alphabet, I found it really is extremely easy to learn a new symbol set for language you already know, so, changing away from the traditional symbols isn't even that massive of an endeavor. I think they did do an OK job with using screen space well, but at the cost of legibility to a degree. That said, the more I think on it, maybe the author did too. Sure, individual letters aren't as legible, but the point is almost more that words become single characters, more like Mandarin. If those characters are legible, than it doesn't matter that the individual letters are not. If you don't know a word, you're already going to be individually inspecting the letters. (of course, it will still be mildly more difficult with dotsies)
- retreatguru 8y ago
  This was my favourite aspect of dotsies: that words began to have familiar shapes. I stopped needing to parse certain words because their shape was so unique and memorable. At the same time it would be interesting to see it implemented based on letter frequency rather than order in the alphabet. It was great fun to read!
  - Ndymium 8y ago
    Isn't that true for "normal" text too? Don't we skim text usually pretty quickly based on how the words look like, instead of reading every letter one by one?
    - p1esk 8y ago
      Same is true for morse code sound patterns.
- trogdoro 8y ago
  > It doesn't really make sense to optimize for screen space like this. However, the teaching style along with a symbol alphabet that IS trying to solve for better legibility ... Optimizing for legibility as opposed to screen space is a distinction that isn't very meaningful in practice. Because if words aren't legible enough, people increase the font size until they are. If something is extremely legible (like latin letters at a 40pt font size) people will naturally tend to decrease the size. So screen space and legibility are largely different labels for the same concept. With some wiggle room but not that much.
Koshkin 8y ago
Love it! Could be used for printing a novel on a single page at 600 dpi.
billconan 8y ago
just use Chinese, it’s optimized for screen space (each character occupies a square, and has complex meaning of a word, and people read their shapes, rather than stroke by stroke )
- Koshkin 8y ago
  But dots are more compact than strokes.
  - kijin 8y ago
    Strokes allow for much more graceful degradation when you have to use a pen and paper.
    - bredren 8y ago
      I think a key point of the language is that it points toward machine-reproduced printing and display only. Writing can still be Chinese, English or any other language. But for in-place printed labeling or digital display, something like this might be interesting.
- qlk1123 8y ago
  >just use Chinese, it’s optimized for screen space ... [cite needed][original research?]
  - mcguire 8y ago
    It occurs to me that the suggestion is actually interesting from an information theoretic standpoint. I understand that Chinese as a language is relatively "telegraphic" to start with. Is there a quantifiable difference with English writing? How much is the language and how much the writing system?
  - birracerveza 8y ago
    Well, for example, per Google Translate Automobile 汽车 Reading chinese is basically the human version of attempting to read a .zip file.
gallerdude 8y ago
Only hackers would try to reimplement the alphabet. I can't decide whether I should be proud or embarrassed.
- StavrosK 8y ago
  Definitely proud. Why embarrassed?
  - the_cat_kittles 8y ago
    because it can come off as an incredible arrogance borne out of incredible ignorance. it really depends on how the idea is presented though.
  - hoorayimhelping 8y ago
    Because the hubris of tech people to think something like "hey, trillions of humans have collectively decided over a few thousand years that the latin alphabet hits a pretty good sweet spot in human communication. I bet they didn't consider how readable it is, though. I can do better than all of them," is wearing thin. This came up in the Robinhood checking thread a few days ago. "Do you really think that you're going to outsmart a financial institution that employs people like you (but smarter) because you happen to be better at math than your facebook friends who studied polysci?" The hubris of people in tech who think they're the only people who notice things is getting really tiresome. Having said that, I think that's a slippery slope of a stance to take, because it stifles creativity and novel solutions, which history shows often come up when they're not looked for. But I think that's kind of the sentiment of embarrassment they were expressing: "groan, another techie is going to disrupt something that doesn't need disrupting." Edit: To the people responding to this (and downvoting): this person asked for an explanation for why someone would feel embarrassment at this. I was trying to give what I thought was a reasonable explanation. I don't actually feel embarrassed by this, I was just trying to understand and articulate someone else's feelings on this. I'm sorry if the explanation didn't do it for you.
    - mikeash 8y ago
Koshkin 8y ago
I think Hebrew alphabet is more economical than this.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
StavrosK 8y ago
I feel compelled to write up a summary of the comments here and responses to each one: > This is useless. Who cares? It's super cool! > This is not well-suited for use case X. Did you read the page? It's so great that someone thought of this and did it. > This has been done before. SUPER. COOL. > It's hard to read. I don't know what you aren't getting about this. > What if it implemented improvement X? I don't know, I didn't write it. Maybe the author would appreciate the suggestion!
- jeremyw 8y ago
  I feel like HN should implement a "positive-only" or "constructive-only" flag for posts, whether set by posters or moderators. Perhaps all Show HN. Start to experiment, see what sticks.
  - rhacker 8y ago
    It would be great to have a sliding scale Mean comments allowable: 0 --x--------- 100 15
    - yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
      Isn't this almost exactly what slashdot has?
  - TomMckenny 8y ago
    It is a pity an intellectually curious person's work posted to a forum of presumably intellectually curious people gets a bit beat up. George Bernard Shaw worked out a new alphabet too. Tolkien built a language for books about goblins and elves. I can't image how they would be greeted. But perhaps it's just a bad day or hour or something.
    - coryrc 8y ago
      Had Tolkien not been "bit beat up" he would have written the whole thing in Qenya and no one would have ever heard of it.
sammycdubs 8y ago
I wonder if typography can exist within a writing system like this?
- baroffoos 8y ago
  Just wait for the serif version
- ineedasername 8y ago
  dots with serifs?
0x8BADF00D 8y ago
This is interesting for a lot of reasons. It’s almost like a compression scheme for text as opposed to an image. The question is, is it lossless or lossy? What is the Shannon entropy for this set of symbols?
- StavrosK 8y ago
  It's definitely lossless (it encodes leter-for-letter). However, it has much higher entropy than the latin alphabet.
  - Koshkin 8y ago
    > higher entropy How so? The entropy looks (dangerously) low to me.
    - StavrosK 8y ago
      High entropy = very low margin for error. "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" is low entropy, "JkjgpUBn74AREExy" is high.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - Koshkin 8y ago
        Well I guess I am more used to the physicist’s definition of entropy, which can be described as “the higher the entropy, the less we care about the details.”
        StavrosK 8y ago
        Very possibly, but, as far as I know, in the information-theoretic sense (which is what we mean when we talk about alphabets and conflating one letter for another) it's "high entropy" = "low redundancy".
- daveFNbuck 8y ago
walterbell 8y ago
This looks like the message-from-the-future font on Travellers.
- Koshkin 8y ago
  (It actually doesn’t, if you look closely.)
the_cat_kittles 8y ago
you could "solve" the same "problem" by making font smaller. but its annoying to read. oh whoops, thats what actually matters. this page is like the purest expression a cerebral cortex thinking its the only thing that exists. i like it though, because it accidentally makes some good points about the human condition. one is that top down designed shit like this (and esperanto) often sucks incredibly hard, and i think the reason is that the "problems" they fix aren't problems at all. another is that its hilarious to claim to solve a problem by asking someone to first relearn to read. "just spend 1000 hours learning this, then it will be easy!". another is how easily people seem to oversimplify what is happening when you do something. someone recently told me that an upright bass is just a "dumb guitar" because its tuned the same and has fewer strings. sure, if you reduce the playing of an instrument to the production of a certain pitch, and that alone (even then... no, but i digress...) but of course thats really dumb. as is the case with "dotsies". you've decided that our visual software is agnostic, and we can rework the written word to whatever suits your optimization criteria, which seem to be that you can fit more letters in a small space, and that words have a shape-like gestalt. even if it were true that these two criteria are paramount, making a thin font of english letters would work way better. but i see no evidence or justification for those criteria being important. its not that you cant improve on things, but how do you know whats really difficult about reading? did you do research? did you study the literature? seems like there are lots of more obvious problems you could try to solve. this is all getting a little ranty, and i risk sounding stupid if it turns out you are coming from a place of knowledge. so if you are, id be curious to know (and why isn't that on the page?)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
userbinator 8y ago
This reminds me of the old "real programmers use binary" meme, and how I experimented with bitmap image files by typing text into them and looking at the resulting patterns. I wonder if I'm the only one who would find it easier to read if it was just ASCII printed in binary instead of its own symbol-set. ASCII has some patterns which make it easy to memorise, and it's something a lot of developers have indeed memorised already. That would make a great "1337 hax0r" font. ...and why not go the whole hog and make it 8 bits, so you can encode all of Unicode (as UTF-8)...
tedunangst 8y ago
On a barely more productive note, I am pretty sceptical that an "optimized" alphabet glyph would be one dot for a b c d e, two adjacent dots for f g h i, etc. How likely is it that alphabetical order also happens to be the best dot pattern?
- roryokane 8y ago
  This question is discussed further in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18704204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18704204. The author trogdoro has replied there.
pqhwan 8y ago
Interesting, similar to how the korean alphabet works; letters are composed into syllabic units. “Lol,” for example, is 롤, which is a combination of ㄹ + ㅗ + ㄹ. It’s easy to see how they match up with their latin counterparts.
bcheung 8y ago
Very interesting. It's definitely more compact but I would challenge the more readable claim. If you think about how the human vision system is constructed (similar to convnets in deep learning), the brain uses a hierarchy of constructs like circles, lines, corners, etc. Recognizing letters requires the triggering of multiple layers of these constructs. A dot, and another dot 1 pixel higher or lower is easy to get conflated. There's going to be a high degree of uncertainty. We have a hard enough time distinguishing '1' and 'l', and 'O' and '0'. This makes it so every letter takes on that trait. We usually must rely on context of the surrounding letters and words to fill in the missing information. I think the concept of this idea is valid, but we need more than moving pixels up and down to distinguish letters. If instead a form existed that mixed various small primitive shapes it might work. I'm not an expert on the vision system but I would think, sticking to at most 2 different locations instead of 5, and mixing in vertical lines, horizontal lines, diagonals, corners, and circles might be work exploring. There's also color but lots of people are color blind.
- qlk1123 8y ago
  > I'm not an expert on the vision system but I would think, sticking to at most 2 different locations instead of 5, and mixing in vertical lines, horizontal lines, diagonals, corners, and circles might be work exploring. What you proposed here turns out very similar to the elements of Korean Characters. As an East Asian who is native to Chinese Characters, two-dimensional symbols are always more appealing to me. I started to learn English 25 years ago while Japanese 10, but I read Japanese much more faster than English even without any Kanji.
  - KennyCason 8y ago
    I'm impressed, If you remove the Kanji from Japanese, my reading speed goes down significantly. Though, as a native English speaker of course my English (alphabet) reading speed is faster than my Japanese (Hiragana/Katana) speed. What I do find very interesting though is that given I know all/most of the words in a Chinese dialogue, I have noticed that my Chinese reading speed is close to on-par with my English reading speed. I find Chinese very efficient to read/parse. I think there are many factors that contribute to this such as well defined word roots, similar sized characters, relatively small number of radicals (larger than alphabet of course), very simple/clean grammar. The more I study, learn, and use Chinese, I really wish Chinese was the international language. It's power and elegance always amazes me. Even more so as I get further into Chinese literature, poetry, culture, humor, etc. I've studied Japanese/Chinese both for a long time (10-15 years). Nowadays, I use Chinese everyday as that's the language my wife and I use. As a pure alphabet goes, I really like the Korean implementation. I was able to mostly learn and retain it with only 1-2 hours of study.
snek 8y ago
It's a damn shame this font isn't properly kerned, I put it in my term and immediately started throwing up. If the dotsies form a block like they do on the site, then the numbers/punctuation is overlapping and broken.
- calibas 8y ago
  Firefox handles it well, with a barely noticeable bar of grey in between each character.
- trogdoro 8y ago
  The terminal is tricky, due to the monospace aspect. It degrades readability when the spaces between the words are as skinny as the letters, but that's what a requirement of a monospace font. One (though not perfect) workaround is to make both the spaces and the letters a little fatter. Also making the numbers readable is a challenge with monospace. I've made numbers that are more adapted to the terminal, but they could use some improvement.
reportingsjr 8y ago
For people interested in non-latin methods of writing I would suggest checking out shorthand writing as well as the shavian alphabet. I find shavian particularly interesting since it is based on phonetic pronuncation with which I've had many issues and embarrassments!
- calibas 8y ago
  Here's a good site for anyone interested, it covers both shavian and dotsies: https://www.omniglot.com/writing/shavian.htm https://www.omniglot.com/writing/shavian.htm https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/dotsies.htm https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/dotsies.htm
Procrastes 8y ago
I believe it was an HN thread years ago where I first discovered Dotsies. I spent a very satisfying afternoon learning to read it and write it. I then labelled all sorts of cables and patch boards and such with it around my cubicle for fun. I only kept them up for a few days, but it was a blast learning to read something cryptic and cool looking at a glance with so little effort. If only for that idle distraction Dotsies is a worthy hack. I really think half the fun is in the teaching method.
- shdon 8y ago
  It is fun. I actually used (and still use) the "Standard Galactic Alphabet" from the Commander Keen games every once in a while, which is a little easier to read and write, yet almost as baffling to non-insiders :)
bcheung 8y ago
There's also using multiple shades from dark to light. That might actually be easier to read if you can throw in a few light intensities are have less positional variants. 2 shades with 3 positions would be less error prone than 5 positions of only 1 shade.
- trogdoro 8y ago
  I tried that, as well as with color variations. The problem that arises is when you view them at small or even medium font sizes, a black dot next to a red or gray dot just looks like a blurry black dot.
airesearcher 8y ago
Why didn't the designer select dot positions based on letter frequency or letter pairing frequency in English? This could have yielded a font that would be more likely to make pretty geometric shapes. Even a simple improvement like vowels all having higher dot positions in the font, and consonants having lower positions, could be interesting. It seems that the dot positions are just based on letter position in the alphabet. There is probably a way to come up with dot positions that yield much nicer looking shapes.
- jpfed 8y ago
  My suspicion is that the way to improve legibility is to consider ways to make symbol images more robust to noise. In particular, if a symbol image were perturbed, would the context help you figure out what that symbol should be? For each letter, we can build a histogram of contexts that letter occurs in for a sufficiently large corpus. An example is the letter "o", whose occurrences in the previous sentence have the following contexts: f_r (twice), t_g, c_n, _c, c_r. Each letter's context histograms have some similarity with each other letter's. We want different letters that have similar contexts to have widely differing appearances, because if their appearances were similar, their contexts will be of less help to the reader in disambiguating. And letters with sufficiently different contexts may be allowed to be more similar in appearance (note e.g. the archaic long "s", which despite visual ſimilarity to "f" is easily distinguished from it by the different contexts it appears in).
  - blueblimp 8y ago
    That's a very interesting point and suggests that, counterintuitively, it would actually be bad for (for example) vowels to look similar to each other. Another way to use language statistics would be to make the font variable-width (which may help with legibility) but make commonly-occurring letters thin.
  - benj111 8y ago
    This doesn't preclude optimising vowels for example though, just them looking similar. I'm not convinced I could differentiate M N and O without context, having a known vowel to differentiate the heights you're looking at would help?
caf 8y ago
I am still not sure if this is an elaborate satire or not.
spyckie2 8y ago
Tried to create a mapping that mimics positioning or spacial makeup of letters so you can "guess" more instead of looking up the letters all the time: http://dotsies.org/design-your-own/#iaeouvxnsfrcbqlzkjwygphmdt http://dotsies.org/design-your-own/#iaeouvxnsfrcbqlzkjwygphm... A couple of design values: - vowels 1 dot seems like a good plan - ending with s / y should be easily recognizable - tall letters should be tall (tlbdk etc) To learn, read one word from the top paragraph and see if it "looks" like the bottom dotsies. Then gradually try to read the paragraph without looking at the next word. Open to improvements!
- trogdoro 8y ago
  I like your mapping just about as well as the Dotsies mapping. Slightly more speckled vs angular. I wish others who are finding fault with the mapping would go down this path as well. I think they would quickly realize that one mapping is (generally speaking) about as good as another, so you might as well pick one with a good order. That's why I created that page.
neurobashing 8y ago
The first thing I thought of was Marain, from The Culture novels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture: “Designed to be represented either in binary or symbol-written form, Marain is also regarded as an aesthetically pleasing language by the Culture. The symbols of the Marain alphabet can be displayed in three-by-three grids of binary (yes/no, black/white) dots and thus correspond to nine-bit wide binary numbers.”
- bencollier49 8y ago
  Came here to say the same thing. Interesting to see that someone has (independently?) had the same sort of idea.
  - cpeterso 8y ago
    Me too. :) Here are some examples of Marain symbols designed by Iain M. Banks: http://trevor-hopkins.com/banks/a-few-notes-on-marain.html http://trevor-hopkins.com/banks/a-few-notes-on-marain.html
GolDDranks 8y ago
I think this is a funny and cool idea, but there's quite big flaw: it doesn't have a clear baseline. Without context, "ABBA" basically looks identical to "DEED". Also, if you go so far to create a new alphabet, you could also make it phonetic. Rather than this one, I'd like to see a phonetic syllable alphabet (like the Korean one) for English.
- SkyMarshal 8y ago
  I was thinking the same thing re: phonetic. Dotsies opening paragraph claims the latin alphabet was optimized for writing, but it wasn't, it was optimized for phonetics (if anything at all), which is useful to both reading and writing. However, we know from Korean and Japanese Katakana/Hiragana that phonetics can be generalized into syllables and don't have to be spelled out as in English/Latin. A Dotsies version of that would be ideal.
deegles 8y ago
I once managed to install the Dotsies font to a rooted Android... it was fun for about 10 minutes! I agree with the other comments that a font more focused on overall word shape would probably be easier to read at high speed.
merricksb 8y ago
Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14825571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14825571 (2017, 22 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3601687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3601687 (2012, 98 comments)
- johnfn 8y ago
  I was going to post some comment about how the comments here were all overly negative for what was obviously just someone having fun. Then I read the comments in 2012. Jesus Christ. In any case, it's sad to me how when people on HN see someone having a bit of fun or messing around, their first instinct is to knock it down.
  - umanwizard 8y ago
    The website is not presenting this as just having fun, but rather making the strong claim that it is actually better than the writing system we've been using. Making such very strong claims ("I've come up with something better than what civilization has produced thus far...") naturally invites debate, especially when they seem implausible on their face and aren't backed up by a very solid argument. There would be a lot fewer negative comments if this were presented like "hey, look at this neat game I made up..."
    - johnfn 8y ago
      I’m not seeing your quote on the page, and I think that drives my point home: you have created a narrative for the post that doesn’t exist. I mean, come on. They’re called “dotsies”! Does that sound like the name of a font designed to replace ours, by someone who honestly thinks they’ve advanced civilization? Or does it sound like someone having fun?
      - umanwizard 8y ago
        > The latin alphabet (abc...) was created thousands of years ago, and is optimized for writing, not reading. About time for an update, no?
nine_k 8y ago
Problems that I immediately see with the approach: * No baseline or other orienting structure, so vertical shifts easily change meaning ("ab" turns to "bc"), same for rotations. * No redundancy to allow for recognizing incomplete / garbled / damaged letters. Both features are prominent in any machine-readable encoding (like bar codes or QR codes), and are relatively easy to find in any human script. The idea behind making more compact visual representation of letters has merit. This particular implementation of it is impractical, though. It only looks acceptable on a demo page. (While at it, I know two well-designed phonetic writing systems: Tengwar and Hangul. Neither is super compact, but both are easy to learn and read, because of the internal logic. Dotsies are way more arbitrary; they don't exploit any connections between letter or sounds they represent.)
- beizhia 8y ago
  There's also Shavian and Quikscript for English, which handle the language phonetically. I think it's a big miss for any new writing system to keep a language with 38 or so sounds limited to 26 letters. Not to mention other languages that might want to use it.
  - ngngngng 8y ago
    Don't forget about the deseret alphabet. I think it's a shame that never stuck.
    - nine_k 8y ago
      Deseret us a bit too frivolous graphically, and not consistent enough. Also, English has many pronunciation variations, and links between many words may be obvious in writing but not as much in sound (breath / breathe). English needs something more of a morphology-based writing system, not a pure phonetic representation (like Spanish).
  - mkl 8y ago
    I learned Shavian a few years ago, with my own transliteration dictionary based on my New Zealand English pronunciation (which Shavian doesn't quite seem to handle all of). Unfortunately, different dialects of English have very (inconsistently) different pronunciations, and hence there would be many different spellings for the same words; I really struggled to read Shavian written by people from other parts of the world. Going phonetic may well mean giving up on fast reading through whole word recognition.
xenadu02 8y ago
If you want a quick and easy way to compress the visual space taken up by text then we have several existing examples to choose from. The most trivial is omission of vowels, instead relying on context or vowel marks (or some combination). Wrds r srprsngl lgbl wtht vwls. Anotherisomissionofspaces. Lots of western (and other) scripts have been written these ways in the past. Neither can be said to have evolved to make text easier to write! Including the vowels is more difficult to write and both are more costly because they take up more space, which means larger tablets or more animal skin and ink required. We settled on including vowels and word spacing to make text more legible, so I'm not sure where the author's claim about latin working the way it does to benefit writing comes from. If the OP wants to claim letters like b/d/p/q, m/n, w/v/u, etc are to the benefit of writers OK but "dotsies" is even worse in lacking distinct shapes. Humans like symmetry and patterns so it seems far more likely some letters are variations on a pattern or mirror images because it is visually pleasing or easy to stamp new letters out of existing known shapes. If you think about it a/b/c/d/e/g/o/p/q are arguably variations on the same pattern, with g -> j, and j -> i following.
tasty_freeze 8y ago
Being well past my likely mid-life point, and having been a user of glasses for the past 40 years, I do not appreciate the font at all.
deleted 8y ago
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c3534l 8y ago
How is making everything look the same better for reading? I can read UPC codes more easily that this garbage. This is static. It's compressed like for computers, not expanded for humans.
deleted 8y ago
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the_clarence 8y ago
I spent time learning it years ago. It was... useless. It’s just too small and not readable. But then chinese websites have very small fonts as well, so maybe I should have persisted. If I could watch someone reading fluently in dotsies that would really impress me.
- trogdoro 8y ago
  > But then chinese websites have very small fonts as well Right you are. It took me a while to be able to shrink it down. You have to start large and gradually shrink it down. > If I could watch someone reading fluently in dotsies Any time.
  - the_clarence 8y ago
    Could you make a video of that?
nabla9 8y ago
As others have pointed out, this is not ideal. At least it requires lots of work. If we could start from the scratch, Hangul style syllabic blocks that combine alphabetic and syllabic systems might be the ideal.
wukerplank 8y ago
How does this fare with visually impaired people? Or with people 50+ who need reading glasses?
arc2 8y ago
The problem I see there is you think there is only English. While you may write "naïve" as "naive" and lose nothing, there are some other languages too and the advantage of Latin is that it's visual and Latin letters can be slightly changed to have something similar but different. Do you think "Fußgängerübergänge" can be read as "Fussgangerubergange" or "zażółć" as "zazolc"? (German and Polish respectively)
- jen729w 8y ago
  There was a thread here (found it) just the other day where Polish people specifically said "we don't use those accented characters any more because it's too hard on mobile and we don't need to" (heavy paraphrasing mine). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18688619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18688619
  - oblio 8y ago
    I see a Slovenian person claiming that, I think, but no Poles. Also, often those "accents" are different sounds. Ș in Romanian is sh, ț is ts, ă is uh, â is a sound which is not present in English (at least not explicitly). You can get rid of them but there's definitely ambiguity. Even French has é which sounds nothing like the French e.
- slipgate55 8y ago
  While I do get your point, Germans specifically handle the lack of umlauts (e.g. in digital spaces that don't allow them) by simply substituting "ä" with "ae", "ö" with "oe" and "ü" with "ue". Similarly, "ß" can be replaced with "ss" without losing much readability at all.
- yoz-y 8y ago
  As a contrary to the other comments to parent, I'd say that in French and Slovak, although many people do not use accents on chat platforms and irc, they are very important in longer prose. These languages, without accents, would be very hard and slow to read. So yeah, for languages with no accents this might be fine but that's it.
nuguy 8y ago
I think we should invent a new language for humanity. Ive tried to design one a little bit. There are tons of ways to describe the sounds that a human mouth can make, and you can find very detailed nomenclature about it but generally it is useful to think of a spoken language as consisting of a set of phonemes, which are fundamental sounds. I looked at a list of the most common phonemes and just decided to use the top 20 in order to make the pronunciation and recognition of all the sounds of this new language as easy as possible. Between all the languages of the world, there is considerably more overlap of some sounds than others, so I believe it’s useful to use the most overlapped ones. Most languages consist of open phonemes and closed phonemes. Most languages include words that end on a closed sound like the word “stop.” Notice that actually saying this word without making an open sound and the closed “p” sound is impossible. In reality the word sounds like “stop-ah” because of the physics of the mouth. In this new language, all words start with a closed sound and end with an open sound, for example “gah” “dah” “dee” “nee” and so on. If you take a bunch of common closed sounds and open sounds, and have none that sound similar to the others in any way (distinctive sounds are necessary for easy learning and understanding by learners because after a certain age, discriminating between similar sounding sounds is impossible.) then you have a list that can create around 40 or 400 “base combinations” of one closed sound and one open sound, like the examples above. I can’t remeber the exact number but I have it all written out somewhere. Limiting words to 20 or 30 combinations of these base combinations, you have a word space that is larger than a human can memorize probably, even after cutting out all the bad combinations like “dee-dee-dee-dee-dee.” So in the end you have words that might look like “nah-kah-too-nigh.” You give up compactness compared to English but gain advantages in other areas. Namely clarity and truer correlation between how a word is spelled and pronounced which is key for learning a new language. Also it’s impossible to have something like two words that sound the same like “two” and “too.” The language would cross of several base combinations as I mentioned earlier. These singletons “dee” “dah” “nee” and so on, would not have any meaning. The next level up, two of these combinations together like “dee-nee” or “too-goo” would have meanings that are fundamental and common and would act as root words to form other higher level words just like in English with Latin and Greek. So for example the root word “dee-soo” means to finish, to terminate, to end. There is a joke in there by the way. And the root word “vigh-tah” might mean life, animation or prosperity. So the word “dee-soo-vigh-tah” might mean death. And so on. I think the root word system is very good in English and doing it very deliberately in a new language would be good. Often in English we make up words with other words. Or we start to use two words, a phrase, as it’s own word. This would be formalized into this new language with vocal and written markers to insert in between individual words that when spliced together form a good word for some new thing. This might act both as a staging tool for new concepts before they are formally introduced into the dictionary but also a better way of improvising combinations on the spot to meet strange or funny one-off combinations. Unlike thai and a few other languages, written words have delimiters (!) and unlike English, it isn’t an empty space that can easily be interpreted incorrectly. The alphabet would consist of very carefully designed letters, each one representing one of the aforementioned base sounds. Each letter would be designed so as to be very difficult to write or read in a way that causes it to be mistaken for another letter. In English we cross our zeros to not confuse them with The letter O. This language would effectively do that in advance for all letters. Still haven’t thought of what conjugation method would be best. Or other higher level stuff.
karmakaze 8y ago
The mapping has not been thought out. If designing a new representation, why map the single dots from a-e, single dashes f-i, etc. More thought was put into Morse code, which even used vertically would be better. [Sad that this tops HN.]
SSchick 8y ago
This reminds me of the fonts used in Stargate: Atlantis https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/ancients.htm https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/ancients.htm
otabdeveloper1 8y ago
> About time for an update, no? No.
bredren 8y ago
When watching sci-fi films like Prospect that feature strange character systems, I often wonder how we might have turned toward something like that to label ships and stuff. (Presuming no alien cultural injection) And then I see this, and despite some of the valid criticism of this particular set I now understand how english or some other recognizable written language might not be a guarantee for labeling in the future.
singularity2001 8y ago
Combine this with Millitext[0] for optimal ... readability? brevity. [0] https://advent.morr.cc/2018/17 https://advent.morr.cc/2018/17 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18702900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18702900
aworldofchange 8y ago
Definitively an attractive idea. Congratulations! But, as I read the comments, it looks to me that only experts and scientific analysis and evaluation would determine if this is something worthwhile pursuing.
lodyb 8y ago
I think it would be great to have a constant underscore over the baseline, so you can tell single characters apart (a,b,c,d) are currently impossible to distinguish if you have them printed arbitrarily on a page. Perhaps the characters could be colour coded, too? As we are not limited by having to switch out pens, why not? I think it would make reading much faster and it would be easy to disable/enable. I dislike the implementation of punctuation, I would prefer a font that uses a monospaced grid and sticks with it, so you can render the font on teeny tiny displays.
AnnoyingSwede 8y ago
This is amazing, standardizing on it now.
rekshaw 8y ago
It's a great idea and I am all for efficiency. My only worry is that the vertical alignment of the dots drastically alters the word. a,b,c,d,e are all the same exact black square, just moved up and down the vertical axis. Same with p, s, and v. It's the equivalent of python requiring precise spaces for it to work properly. I guess I should hold any comments until I actually try it properly, but that would take me years :)
dmos62 8y ago
This is so cool. I'd like to be able to change it for my needs. I'd try making vowels round, so that I'd have more visual cues.
fsiefken 8y ago
Ithkuil 2.0 (9 vowels and 29 consonants) could use a similar setup for it's writing system, but as mentioned by others should make the mapping more intuitive; using dots just because a,b,c,d,e are the first 5 letters is not.
hek2600 8y ago
Very cool. I like that text to speech works with this!
techbio 8y ago
Creating new characters? Using simple bitmaps for early letters and more complex ones for later letters, because that's really how letters are used in English. /s Maybe should have used some Gestalt design to differentiate vowels and common vs. uncommon characters. It's the difference between a QWERTY (or Dvorak) keyboard and an ABC...XYZ one.

Dotsies (2012)

460 points by severine 8y ago

Looking at several word examples I find it easy to get letters mixed up, the pixel position difference is quite precise and there's no other indicators to suggest what letter a letter might be if you know what I mean. I'm aware of my own bias of using the language you grew up using i.e. English and the way capitalist society has encouraged its use for the sake of western convienience more than anything. I do think a language that is logogram based would be the more optimum step and agreeable one.

pavel_lishin 8y ago

One advantage of regular letters compared to this is that it's pretty easy to tell that even a fairly mangled A is still an A; a word written in dotsies loses a lot of its legibility as soon as it's not displayed in fairly large pixels across a very clear background. Viewing things at an angle? While it moves by? On a dirty or wet piece of paper? Forget about it. It's a super fun idea, though. I would 100% put this in the background, or even the foreground, of some future scifi scape.

jdougan 8y ago
Dotsies is even worse if your eyes are some variant of broken. Nearsighted, cataracts, crosseyed, etc.
- Koshkin 8y ago
  Perfect for automatic readers though.
  - justinator 8y ago
    Too bad I'm not an automatic reader!
    - pavel_lishin 8y ago
      I've been an automated reader since I was probably, what, five years old?
      - ineedasername 8y ago
        Me too, I didn't even mean to read your comment, but as soon as my eyes saw it: boom, processed and read. like a computer without virus scan or security or anything, to see the words was to run their executable on my wetware.
        tigershark 8y ago
        I actually remember to have had severe headaches when I was something like 4 or 5 and I experienced the passage from deliberate reading and automatic reading. It was much worse being around in a car and just looking outside and unwillingly read all the signs because it added also elements of motion sickness to it...
        ineedasername 8y ago
        I saw a great t-shirt at the 2006 HOPE conference that read, "Just by reading this you have given me control of piece of your brain"
  - hannasanarion 8y ago
    Nope: automatic readers rely heavily on redundancy. QR codes are like 20% data, 80% error correction. OCR is still a difficult problem, despite the redundancy built in to the alphabet. There's no way a machine reader could tell apart characters that differ by one pixel
Semiapies 8y ago
Yeah, it's a telling point that when we're asked to read passages of Dotsies, the font's sized up least three times (36px to 42px)—and so at least nine times the screen area taken—compared to the base 13px size used in the "How much better is it?" example. You're going to need damn good eyes to read Dotsies at anything like 13px, and I suspect even the sharp-eyed are going to misread a lot. Size Dotsies text up to the point that people of average vision can read it as reliably as a normal font at a reasonable size, and I don't think you're going to get much, if any, greater information density. I'm reminded of Speedtalk, a language from Robert Heinlein's story "Gulf", which had every combination of phoneme and delivery (pitch, length, etc.) represent a word in the Basic English vocabulary. So, every spoken "word" in the language is actually a full sentence. But, it takes intense futuristic training just to be able to speak vaguely intelligibly in it, because all the normal imprecisions of speaking (much less speaking in a new language) take any tiny error from "You used 'record' as a noun, but with a long 'e' and the stress on the second syllable." to "You have a hovercraft, and it's full of what???" Now imagine trying to follow speech in such a language if the speaker's out of breath, alarmed, surrounded by background noise, etc. Just not enough redundancy for reliable communication.
- Vendan 8y ago
  Eels. My hovercraft is full of eels. http://www.omniglot.com/language/phrases/hovercraft.htm http://www.omniglot.com/language/phrases/hovercraft.htm
  - Semiapies 8y ago
    That's the reference, yes.
IgorPartola 8y ago
Not to mention recognizing individual letters. The difference between “a” and “b” in Latin alphabet is drastic. In dotsies you could only tell them apart if other letters near them give you relative height of the dots to some baseline. Dotsies seem to make a tradeoff where they optimize for higher information density at the cost of much higher error rate (or requirement for precision and accuracy if you will). I also definitely see your point about font sizes. Basically it’s a valiant attempt at a reimagined alphabet but I don’t think it actually achieves higher info density in the real world.

ziffusion 8y ago

Is this person completely insane? Or am I just not getting something? In which universe is this font remotely useful?

Waterluvian 8y ago
I think the goal is "hey that's neat!"
lumberjack 8y ago
It's like DVORAK but for reading. The ambition is noble.
- snuxoll 8y ago
  DVORAK isn’t useless though, it’s the only reason I was able to learn touch typing.
BucketSort 8y ago
I thought this was an obvious prank until I read the comments here... which I also assume to be a part of the prank.

tlb 8y ago

I like the idea of users being able to choose the font they prefer to read in. It's not very hard to do: you could configure your browser and your code editor and maybe Kindle and be able to read in the new font 90% of the time. Can anyone who uses https://www.dyslexiefont.com/ https://www.dyslexiefont.com/ comment on how hard it is to have it everywhere? But Dotsies seems to be solving the wrong problem: using the fewest pixels. I think the right problem is being able to skim large amounts of text quickly, for which typical fonts are pretty good. You can find whether there are any numbers on a page, for instance, in well under a second.

zimpenfish 8y ago
I use it (well, OpenDyslexie) as my only font on desktop Firefox and it's been ok for me for a year or thereabouts. I did use it in iOS Pocket as well but they dropped it a while back.

reaperducer 8y ago

About time for an update, no? No. Once again, Silicon Valley "discovers" something that was already invented. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braille https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braille

nerdponx 8y ago
How easy it would be to "read" Braille visually, like Dotsies? I imagine they are optimized for different uses, no?
- mwcampbell 8y ago
  Sighted braille teachers can read braille visually, even upside down, so they can read what's coming out of the student's brailler in real time. I had at least one teacher who could do that. But of course, that's a specialized skill. To judge for yourself how conducive braille is to visual reading, when presented as black on white (or the opposite) instead of raised dots on a page, you can grab a braille font here: https://www.hadley.edu/online_course_font.asp https://www.hadley.edu/online_course_font.asp
vokep 8y ago
Yes but that isn't meant for screen space saving or legibility - dotsies is optimizing for both. They could maybe do better on legibility, or maybe it isn't that big a problem...the more I think on it, the more I get where the author was going (and feel they may have successfully reached it, or at least made strong progress)
dang 8y ago
This comment breaks the site guidelines. They ask: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." Also: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here.
the_jeremy 8y ago

vokep 8y ago

I love the way it teaches you, but the other comments are correct. It doesn't really make sense to optimize for screen space like this. However, the teaching style along with a symbol alphabet that IS trying to solve for better legibility (without necessarily any allegiance to dyslexic fonts), could be pretty interesting. In middle school when bored once I made my own symbolic alphabet, I found it really is extremely easy to learn a new symbol set for language you already know, so, changing away from the traditional symbols isn't even that massive of an endeavor. I think they did do an OK job with using screen space well, but at the cost of legibility to a degree. That said, the more I think on it, maybe the author did too. Sure, individual letters aren't as legible, but the point is almost more that words become single characters, more like Mandarin. If those characters are legible, than it doesn't matter that the individual letters are not. If you don't know a word, you're already going to be individually inspecting the letters. (of course, it will still be mildly more difficult with dotsies)

retreatguru 8y ago
This was my favourite aspect of dotsies: that words began to have familiar shapes. I stopped needing to parse certain words because their shape was so unique and memorable. At the same time it would be interesting to see it implemented based on letter frequency rather than order in the alphabet. It was great fun to read!
- Ndymium 8y ago
  Isn't that true for "normal" text too? Don't we skim text usually pretty quickly based on how the words look like, instead of reading every letter one by one?
  - p1esk 8y ago
    Same is true for morse code sound patterns.
trogdoro 8y ago
> It doesn't really make sense to optimize for screen space like this. However, the teaching style along with a symbol alphabet that IS trying to solve for better legibility ... Optimizing for legibility as opposed to screen space is a distinction that isn't very meaningful in practice. Because if words aren't legible enough, people increase the font size until they are. If something is extremely legible (like latin letters at a 40pt font size) people will naturally tend to decrease the size. So screen space and legibility are largely different labels for the same concept. With some wiggle room but not that much.

Koshkin 8y ago

Love it! Could be used for printing a novel on a single page at 600 dpi.

billconan 8y ago

just use Chinese, it’s optimized for screen space (each character occupies a square, and has complex meaning of a word, and people read their shapes, rather than stroke by stroke )

Koshkin 8y ago
But dots are more compact than strokes.
- kijin 8y ago
  Strokes allow for much more graceful degradation when you have to use a pen and paper.
  - bredren 8y ago
    I think a key point of the language is that it points toward machine-reproduced printing and display only. Writing can still be Chinese, English or any other language. But for in-place printed labeling or digital display, something like this might be interesting.
qlk1123 8y ago
>just use Chinese, it’s optimized for screen space ... [cite needed][original research?]
- mcguire 8y ago
  It occurs to me that the suggestion is actually interesting from an information theoretic standpoint. I understand that Chinese as a language is relatively "telegraphic" to start with. Is there a quantifiable difference with English writing? How much is the language and how much the writing system?
- birracerveza 8y ago
  Well, for example, per Google Translate Automobile 汽车 Reading chinese is basically the human version of attempting to read a .zip file.

gallerdude 8y ago

Only hackers would try to reimplement the alphabet. I can't decide whether I should be proud or embarrassed.

StavrosK 8y ago
Definitely proud. Why embarrassed?
- the_cat_kittles 8y ago
  because it can come off as an incredible arrogance borne out of incredible ignorance. it really depends on how the idea is presented though.
- hoorayimhelping 8y ago
  Because the hubris of tech people to think something like "hey, trillions of humans have collectively decided over a few thousand years that the latin alphabet hits a pretty good sweet spot in human communication. I bet they didn't consider how readable it is, though. I can do better than all of them," is wearing thin. This came up in the Robinhood checking thread a few days ago. "Do you really think that you're going to outsmart a financial institution that employs people like you (but smarter) because you happen to be better at math than your facebook friends who studied polysci?" The hubris of people in tech who think they're the only people who notice things is getting really tiresome. Having said that, I think that's a slippery slope of a stance to take, because it stifles creativity and novel solutions, which history shows often come up when they're not looked for. But I think that's kind of the sentiment of embarrassment they were expressing: "groan, another techie is going to disrupt something that doesn't need disrupting." Edit: To the people responding to this (and downvoting): this person asked for an explanation for why someone would feel embarrassment at this. I was trying to give what I thought was a reasonable explanation. I don't actually feel embarrassed by this, I was just trying to understand and articulate someone else's feelings on this. I'm sorry if the explanation didn't do it for you.
  - mikeash 8y ago

Koshkin 8y ago

I think Hebrew alphabet is more economical than this.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

StavrosK 8y ago

I feel compelled to write up a summary of the comments here and responses to each one: > This is useless. Who cares? It's super cool! > This is not well-suited for use case X. Did you read the page? It's so great that someone thought of this and did it. > This has been done before. SUPER. COOL. > It's hard to read. I don't know what you aren't getting about this. > What if it implemented improvement X? I don't know, I didn't write it. Maybe the author would appreciate the suggestion!

jeremyw 8y ago
I feel like HN should implement a "positive-only" or "constructive-only" flag for posts, whether set by posters or moderators. Perhaps all Show HN. Start to experiment, see what sticks.
- rhacker 8y ago
  It would be great to have a sliding scale Mean comments allowable: 0 --x--------- 100 15
  - yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
    Isn't this almost exactly what slashdot has?
- TomMckenny 8y ago
  It is a pity an intellectually curious person's work posted to a forum of presumably intellectually curious people gets a bit beat up. George Bernard Shaw worked out a new alphabet too. Tolkien built a language for books about goblins and elves. I can't image how they would be greeted. But perhaps it's just a bad day or hour or something.
  - coryrc 8y ago
    Had Tolkien not been "bit beat up" he would have written the whole thing in Qenya and no one would have ever heard of it.

sammycdubs 8y ago

I wonder if typography can exist within a writing system like this?

baroffoos 8y ago
Just wait for the serif version
ineedasername 8y ago
dots with serifs?

0x8BADF00D 8y ago

This is interesting for a lot of reasons. It’s almost like a compression scheme for text as opposed to an image. The question is, is it lossless or lossy? What is the Shannon entropy for this set of symbols?

StavrosK 8y ago
It's definitely lossless (it encodes leter-for-letter). However, it has much higher entropy than the latin alphabet.
- Koshkin 8y ago
  > higher entropy How so? The entropy looks (dangerously) low to me.
  - StavrosK 8y ago
    High entropy = very low margin for error. "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" is low entropy, "JkjgpUBn74AREExy" is high.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - Koshkin 8y ago
      Well I guess I am more used to the physicist’s definition of entropy, which can be described as “the higher the entropy, the less we care about the details.”
      - StavrosK 8y ago
        Very possibly, but, as far as I know, in the information-theoretic sense (which is what we mean when we talk about alphabets and conflating one letter for another) it's "high entropy" = "low redundancy".
daveFNbuck 8y ago

walterbell 8y ago

This looks like the message-from-the-future font on Travellers.

Koshkin 8y ago
(It actually doesn’t, if you look closely.)

the_cat_kittles 8y ago

you could "solve" the same "problem" by making font smaller. but its annoying to read. oh whoops, thats what actually matters. this page is like the purest expression a cerebral cortex thinking its the only thing that exists. i like it though, because it accidentally makes some good points about the human condition. one is that top down designed shit like this (and esperanto) often sucks incredibly hard, and i think the reason is that the "problems" they fix aren't problems at all. another is that its hilarious to claim to solve a problem by asking someone to first relearn to read. "just spend 1000 hours learning this, then it will be easy!". another is how easily people seem to oversimplify what is happening when you do something. someone recently told me that an upright bass is just a "dumb guitar" because its tuned the same and has fewer strings. sure, if you reduce the playing of an instrument to the production of a certain pitch, and that alone (even then... no, but i digress...) but of course thats really dumb. as is the case with "dotsies". you've decided that our visual software is agnostic, and we can rework the written word to whatever suits your optimization criteria, which seem to be that you can fit more letters in a small space, and that words have a shape-like gestalt. even if it were true that these two criteria are paramount, making a thin font of english letters would work way better. but i see no evidence or justification for those criteria being important. its not that you cant improve on things, but how do you know whats really difficult about reading? did you do research? did you study the literature? seems like there are lots of more obvious problems you could try to solve. this is all getting a little ranty, and i risk sounding stupid if it turns out you are coming from a place of knowledge. so if you are, id be curious to know (and why isn't that on the page?)

deleted 8y ago
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userbinator 8y ago

This reminds me of the old "real programmers use binary" meme, and how I experimented with bitmap image files by typing text into them and looking at the resulting patterns. I wonder if I'm the only one who would find it easier to read if it was just ASCII printed in binary instead of its own symbol-set. ASCII has some patterns which make it easy to memorise, and it's something a lot of developers have indeed memorised already. That would make a great "1337 hax0r" font. ...and why not go the whole hog and make it 8 bits, so you can encode all of Unicode (as UTF-8)...

tedunangst 8y ago

On a barely more productive note, I am pretty sceptical that an "optimized" alphabet glyph would be one dot for a b c d e, two adjacent dots for f g h i, etc. How likely is it that alphabetical order also happens to be the best dot pattern?

roryokane 8y ago
This question is discussed further in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18704204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18704204. The author trogdoro has replied there.

pqhwan 8y ago

Interesting, similar to how the korean alphabet works; letters are composed into syllabic units. “Lol,” for example, is 롤, which is a combination of ㄹ + ㅗ + ㄹ. It’s easy to see how they match up with their latin counterparts.

bcheung 8y ago

Very interesting. It's definitely more compact but I would challenge the more readable claim. If you think about how the human vision system is constructed (similar to convnets in deep learning), the brain uses a hierarchy of constructs like circles, lines, corners, etc. Recognizing letters requires the triggering of multiple layers of these constructs. A dot, and another dot 1 pixel higher or lower is easy to get conflated. There's going to be a high degree of uncertainty. We have a hard enough time distinguishing '1' and 'l', and 'O' and '0'. This makes it so every letter takes on that trait. We usually must rely on context of the surrounding letters and words to fill in the missing information. I think the concept of this idea is valid, but we need more than moving pixels up and down to distinguish letters. If instead a form existed that mixed various small primitive shapes it might work. I'm not an expert on the vision system but I would think, sticking to at most 2 different locations instead of 5, and mixing in vertical lines, horizontal lines, diagonals, corners, and circles might be work exploring. There's also color but lots of people are color blind.

qlk1123 8y ago
> I'm not an expert on the vision system but I would think, sticking to at most 2 different locations instead of 5, and mixing in vertical lines, horizontal lines, diagonals, corners, and circles might be work exploring. What you proposed here turns out very similar to the elements of Korean Characters. As an East Asian who is native to Chinese Characters, two-dimensional symbols are always more appealing to me. I started to learn English 25 years ago while Japanese 10, but I read Japanese much more faster than English even without any Kanji.
- KennyCason 8y ago
  I'm impressed, If you remove the Kanji from Japanese, my reading speed goes down significantly. Though, as a native English speaker of course my English (alphabet) reading speed is faster than my Japanese (Hiragana/Katana) speed. What I do find very interesting though is that given I know all/most of the words in a Chinese dialogue, I have noticed that my Chinese reading speed is close to on-par with my English reading speed. I find Chinese very efficient to read/parse. I think there are many factors that contribute to this such as well defined word roots, similar sized characters, relatively small number of radicals (larger than alphabet of course), very simple/clean grammar. The more I study, learn, and use Chinese, I really wish Chinese was the international language. It's power and elegance always amazes me. Even more so as I get further into Chinese literature, poetry, culture, humor, etc. I've studied Japanese/Chinese both for a long time (10-15 years). Nowadays, I use Chinese everyday as that's the language my wife and I use. As a pure alphabet goes, I really like the Korean implementation. I was able to mostly learn and retain it with only 1-2 hours of study.

snek 8y ago

It's a damn shame this font isn't properly kerned, I put it in my term and immediately started throwing up. If the dotsies form a block like they do on the site, then the numbers/punctuation is overlapping and broken.

calibas 8y ago
Firefox handles it well, with a barely noticeable bar of grey in between each character.
trogdoro 8y ago
The terminal is tricky, due to the monospace aspect. It degrades readability when the spaces between the words are as skinny as the letters, but that's what a requirement of a monospace font. One (though not perfect) workaround is to make both the spaces and the letters a little fatter. Also making the numbers readable is a challenge with monospace. I've made numbers that are more adapted to the terminal, but they could use some improvement.

reportingsjr 8y ago

For people interested in non-latin methods of writing I would suggest checking out shorthand writing as well as the shavian alphabet. I find shavian particularly interesting since it is based on phonetic pronuncation with which I've had many issues and embarrassments!

calibas 8y ago
Here's a good site for anyone interested, it covers both shavian and dotsies: https://www.omniglot.com/writing/shavian.htm https://www.omniglot.com/writing/shavian.htm https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/dotsies.htm https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/dotsies.htm

Procrastes 8y ago

I believe it was an HN thread years ago where I first discovered Dotsies. I spent a very satisfying afternoon learning to read it and write it. I then labelled all sorts of cables and patch boards and such with it around my cubicle for fun. I only kept them up for a few days, but it was a blast learning to read something cryptic and cool looking at a glance with so little effort. If only for that idle distraction Dotsies is a worthy hack. I really think half the fun is in the teaching method.

shdon 8y ago
It is fun. I actually used (and still use) the "Standard Galactic Alphabet" from the Commander Keen games every once in a while, which is a little easier to read and write, yet almost as baffling to non-insiders :)

bcheung 8y ago

There's also using multiple shades from dark to light. That might actually be easier to read if you can throw in a few light intensities are have less positional variants. 2 shades with 3 positions would be less error prone than 5 positions of only 1 shade.

trogdoro 8y ago
I tried that, as well as with color variations. The problem that arises is when you view them at small or even medium font sizes, a black dot next to a red or gray dot just looks like a blurry black dot.

airesearcher 8y ago

Why didn't the designer select dot positions based on letter frequency or letter pairing frequency in English? This could have yielded a font that would be more likely to make pretty geometric shapes. Even a simple improvement like vowels all having higher dot positions in the font, and consonants having lower positions, could be interesting. It seems that the dot positions are just based on letter position in the alphabet. There is probably a way to come up with dot positions that yield much nicer looking shapes.

jpfed 8y ago
My suspicion is that the way to improve legibility is to consider ways to make symbol images more robust to noise. In particular, if a symbol image were perturbed, would the context help you figure out what that symbol should be? For each letter, we can build a histogram of contexts that letter occurs in for a sufficiently large corpus. An example is the letter "o", whose occurrences in the previous sentence have the following contexts: f_r (twice), t_g, c_n, _c, c_r. Each letter's context histograms have some similarity with each other letter's. We want different letters that have similar contexts to have widely differing appearances, because if their appearances were similar, their contexts will be of less help to the reader in disambiguating. And letters with sufficiently different contexts may be allowed to be more similar in appearance (note e.g. the archaic long "s", which despite visual ſimilarity to "f" is easily distinguished from it by the different contexts it appears in).
- blueblimp 8y ago
  That's a very interesting point and suggests that, counterintuitively, it would actually be bad for (for example) vowels to look similar to each other. Another way to use language statistics would be to make the font variable-width (which may help with legibility) but make commonly-occurring letters thin.
- benj111 8y ago
  This doesn't preclude optimising vowels for example though, just them looking similar. I'm not convinced I could differentiate M N and O without context, having a known vowel to differentiate the heights you're looking at would help?

caf 8y ago

I am still not sure if this is an elaborate satire or not.

spyckie2 8y ago

Tried to create a mapping that mimics positioning or spacial makeup of letters so you can "guess" more instead of looking up the letters all the time: http://dotsies.org/design-your-own/#iaeouvxnsfrcbqlzkjwygphmdt http://dotsies.org/design-your-own/#iaeouvxnsfrcbqlzkjwygphm... A couple of design values: - vowels 1 dot seems like a good plan - ending with s / y should be easily recognizable - tall letters should be tall (tlbdk etc) To learn, read one word from the top paragraph and see if it "looks" like the bottom dotsies. Then gradually try to read the paragraph without looking at the next word. Open to improvements!

trogdoro 8y ago
I like your mapping just about as well as the Dotsies mapping. Slightly more speckled vs angular. I wish others who are finding fault with the mapping would go down this path as well. I think they would quickly realize that one mapping is (generally speaking) about as good as another, so you might as well pick one with a good order. That's why I created that page.

neurobashing 8y ago

The first thing I thought of was Marain, from The Culture novels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture: “Designed to be represented either in binary or symbol-written form, Marain is also regarded as an aesthetically pleasing language by the Culture. The symbols of the Marain alphabet can be displayed in three-by-three grids of binary (yes/no, black/white) dots and thus correspond to nine-bit wide binary numbers.”

bencollier49 8y ago
Came here to say the same thing. Interesting to see that someone has (independently?) had the same sort of idea.
- cpeterso 8y ago
  Me too. :) Here are some examples of Marain symbols designed by Iain M. Banks: http://trevor-hopkins.com/banks/a-few-notes-on-marain.html http://trevor-hopkins.com/banks/a-few-notes-on-marain.html

GolDDranks 8y ago

I think this is a funny and cool idea, but there's quite big flaw: it doesn't have a clear baseline. Without context, "ABBA" basically looks identical to "DEED". Also, if you go so far to create a new alphabet, you could also make it phonetic. Rather than this one, I'd like to see a phonetic syllable alphabet (like the Korean one) for English.

SkyMarshal 8y ago
I was thinking the same thing re: phonetic. Dotsies opening paragraph claims the latin alphabet was optimized for writing, but it wasn't, it was optimized for phonetics (if anything at all), which is useful to both reading and writing. However, we know from Korean and Japanese Katakana/Hiragana that phonetics can be generalized into syllables and don't have to be spelled out as in English/Latin. A Dotsies version of that would be ideal.

deegles 8y ago

I once managed to install the Dotsies font to a rooted Android... it was fun for about 10 minutes! I agree with the other comments that a font more focused on overall word shape would probably be easier to read at high speed.

merricksb 8y ago

Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14825571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14825571 (2017, 22 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3601687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3601687 (2012, 98 comments)

johnfn 8y ago
I was going to post some comment about how the comments here were all overly negative for what was obviously just someone having fun. Then I read the comments in 2012. Jesus Christ. In any case, it's sad to me how when people on HN see someone having a bit of fun or messing around, their first instinct is to knock it down.
- umanwizard 8y ago
  The website is not presenting this as just having fun, but rather making the strong claim that it is actually better than the writing system we've been using. Making such very strong claims ("I've come up with something better than what civilization has produced thus far...") naturally invites debate, especially when they seem implausible on their face and aren't backed up by a very solid argument. There would be a lot fewer negative comments if this were presented like "hey, look at this neat game I made up..."
  - johnfn 8y ago
    I’m not seeing your quote on the page, and I think that drives my point home: you have created a narrative for the post that doesn’t exist. I mean, come on. They’re called “dotsies”! Does that sound like the name of a font designed to replace ours, by someone who honestly thinks they’ve advanced civilization? Or does it sound like someone having fun?
    - umanwizard 8y ago
      > The latin alphabet (abc...) was created thousands of years ago, and is optimized for writing, not reading. About time for an update, no?

nine_k 8y ago

Problems that I immediately see with the approach: * No baseline or other orienting structure, so vertical shifts easily change meaning ("ab" turns to "bc"), same for rotations. * No redundancy to allow for recognizing incomplete / garbled / damaged letters. Both features are prominent in any machine-readable encoding (like bar codes or QR codes), and are relatively easy to find in any human script. The idea behind making more compact visual representation of letters has merit. This particular implementation of it is impractical, though. It only looks acceptable on a demo page. (While at it, I know two well-designed phonetic writing systems: Tengwar and Hangul. Neither is super compact, but both are easy to learn and read, because of the internal logic. Dotsies are way more arbitrary; they don't exploit any connections between letter or sounds they represent.)

beizhia 8y ago
There's also Shavian and Quikscript for English, which handle the language phonetically. I think it's a big miss for any new writing system to keep a language with 38 or so sounds limited to 26 letters. Not to mention other languages that might want to use it.
- ngngngng 8y ago
  Don't forget about the deseret alphabet. I think it's a shame that never stuck.
  - nine_k 8y ago
    Deseret us a bit too frivolous graphically, and not consistent enough. Also, English has many pronunciation variations, and links between many words may be obvious in writing but not as much in sound (breath / breathe). English needs something more of a morphology-based writing system, not a pure phonetic representation (like Spanish).
- mkl 8y ago
  I learned Shavian a few years ago, with my own transliteration dictionary based on my New Zealand English pronunciation (which Shavian doesn't quite seem to handle all of). Unfortunately, different dialects of English have very (inconsistently) different pronunciations, and hence there would be many different spellings for the same words; I really struggled to read Shavian written by people from other parts of the world. Going phonetic may well mean giving up on fast reading through whole word recognition.

xenadu02 8y ago

If you want a quick and easy way to compress the visual space taken up by text then we have several existing examples to choose from. The most trivial is omission of vowels, instead relying on context or vowel marks (or some combination). Wrds r srprsngl lgbl wtht vwls. Anotherisomissionofspaces. Lots of western (and other) scripts have been written these ways in the past. Neither can be said to have evolved to make text easier to write! Including the vowels is more difficult to write and both are more costly because they take up more space, which means larger tablets or more animal skin and ink required. We settled on including vowels and word spacing to make text more legible, so I'm not sure where the author's claim about latin working the way it does to benefit writing comes from. If the OP wants to claim letters like b/d/p/q, m/n, w/v/u, etc are to the benefit of writers OK but "dotsies" is even worse in lacking distinct shapes. Humans like symmetry and patterns so it seems far more likely some letters are variations on a pattern or mirror images because it is visually pleasing or easy to stamp new letters out of existing known shapes. If you think about it a/b/c/d/e/g/o/p/q are arguably variations on the same pattern, with g -> j, and j -> i following.

tasty_freeze 8y ago

Being well past my likely mid-life point, and having been a user of glasses for the past 40 years, I do not appreciate the font at all.

deleted 8y ago

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c3534l 8y ago

How is making everything look the same better for reading? I can read UPC codes more easily that this garbage. This is static. It's compressed like for computers, not expanded for humans.

deleted 8y ago

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the_clarence 8y ago

I spent time learning it years ago. It was... useless. It’s just too small and not readable. But then chinese websites have very small fonts as well, so maybe I should have persisted. If I could watch someone reading fluently in dotsies that would really impress me.

trogdoro 8y ago
> But then chinese websites have very small fonts as well Right you are. It took me a while to be able to shrink it down. You have to start large and gradually shrink it down. > If I could watch someone reading fluently in dotsies Any time.
- the_clarence 8y ago
  Could you make a video of that?

nabla9 8y ago

As others have pointed out, this is not ideal. At least it requires lots of work. If we could start from the scratch, Hangul style syllabic blocks that combine alphabetic and syllabic systems might be the ideal.

wukerplank 8y ago

How does this fare with visually impaired people? Or with people 50+ who need reading glasses?

arc2 8y ago

The problem I see there is you think there is only English. While you may write "naïve" as "naive" and lose nothing, there are some other languages too and the advantage of Latin is that it's visual and Latin letters can be slightly changed to have something similar but different. Do you think "Fußgängerübergänge" can be read as "Fussgangerubergange" or "zażółć" as "zazolc"? (German and Polish respectively)

jen729w 8y ago
There was a thread here (found it) just the other day where Polish people specifically said "we don't use those accented characters any more because it's too hard on mobile and we don't need to" (heavy paraphrasing mine). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18688619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18688619
- oblio 8y ago
  I see a Slovenian person claiming that, I think, but no Poles. Also, often those "accents" are different sounds. Ș in Romanian is sh, ț is ts, ă is uh, â is a sound which is not present in English (at least not explicitly). You can get rid of them but there's definitely ambiguity. Even French has é which sounds nothing like the French e.
slipgate55 8y ago
While I do get your point, Germans specifically handle the lack of umlauts (e.g. in digital spaces that don't allow them) by simply substituting "ä" with "ae", "ö" with "oe" and "ü" with "ue". Similarly, "ß" can be replaced with "ss" without losing much readability at all.
yoz-y 8y ago
As a contrary to the other comments to parent, I'd say that in French and Slovak, although many people do not use accents on chat platforms and irc, they are very important in longer prose. These languages, without accents, would be very hard and slow to read. So yeah, for languages with no accents this might be fine but that's it.

nuguy 8y ago

I think we should invent a new language for humanity. Ive tried to design one a little bit. There are tons of ways to describe the sounds that a human mouth can make, and you can find very detailed nomenclature about it but generally it is useful to think of a spoken language as consisting of a set of phonemes, which are fundamental sounds. I looked at a list of the most common phonemes and just decided to use the top 20 in order to make the pronunciation and recognition of all the sounds of this new language as easy as possible. Between all the languages of the world, there is considerably more overlap of some sounds than others, so I believe it’s useful to use the most overlapped ones. Most languages consist of open phonemes and closed phonemes. Most languages include words that end on a closed sound like the word “stop.” Notice that actually saying this word without making an open sound and the closed “p” sound is impossible. In reality the word sounds like “stop-ah” because of the physics of the mouth. In this new language, all words start with a closed sound and end with an open sound, for example “gah” “dah” “dee” “nee” and so on. If you take a bunch of common closed sounds and open sounds, and have none that sound similar to the others in any way (distinctive sounds are necessary for easy learning and understanding by learners because after a certain age, discriminating between similar sounding sounds is impossible.) then you have a list that can create around 40 or 400 “base combinations” of one closed sound and one open sound, like the examples above. I can’t remeber the exact number but I have it all written out somewhere. Limiting words to 20 or 30 combinations of these base combinations, you have a word space that is larger than a human can memorize probably, even after cutting out all the bad combinations like “dee-dee-dee-dee-dee.” So in the end you have words that might look like “nah-kah-too-nigh.” You give up compactness compared to English but gain advantages in other areas. Namely clarity and truer correlation between how a word is spelled and pronounced which is key for learning a new language. Also it’s impossible to have something like two words that sound the same like “two” and “too.” The language would cross of several base combinations as I mentioned earlier. These singletons “dee” “dah” “nee” and so on, would not have any meaning. The next level up, two of these combinations together like “dee-nee” or “too-goo” would have meanings that are fundamental and common and would act as root words to form other higher level words just like in English with Latin and Greek. So for example the root word “dee-soo” means to finish, to terminate, to end. There is a joke in there by the way. And the root word “vigh-tah” might mean life, animation or prosperity. So the word “dee-soo-vigh-tah” might mean death. And so on. I think the root word system is very good in English and doing it very deliberately in a new language would be good. Often in English we make up words with other words. Or we start to use two words, a phrase, as it’s own word. This would be formalized into this new language with vocal and written markers to insert in between individual words that when spliced together form a good word for some new thing. This might act both as a staging tool for new concepts before they are formally introduced into the dictionary but also a better way of improvising combinations on the spot to meet strange or funny one-off combinations. Unlike thai and a few other languages, written words have delimiters (!) and unlike English, it isn’t an empty space that can easily be interpreted incorrectly. The alphabet would consist of very carefully designed letters, each one representing one of the aforementioned base sounds. Each letter would be designed so as to be very difficult to write or read in a way that causes it to be mistaken for another letter. In English we cross our zeros to not confuse them with The letter O. This language would effectively do that in advance for all letters. Still haven’t thought of what conjugation method would be best. Or other higher level stuff.

karmakaze 8y ago

The mapping has not been thought out. If designing a new representation, why map the single dots from a-e, single dashes f-i, etc. More thought was put into Morse code, which even used vertically would be better. [Sad that this tops HN.]

SSchick 8y ago

This reminds me of the fonts used in Stargate: Atlantis https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/ancients.htm https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/ancients.htm

otabdeveloper1 8y ago

> About time for an update, no? No.

bredren 8y ago

When watching sci-fi films like Prospect that feature strange character systems, I often wonder how we might have turned toward something like that to label ships and stuff. (Presuming no alien cultural injection) And then I see this, and despite some of the valid criticism of this particular set I now understand how english or some other recognizable written language might not be a guarantee for labeling in the future.

singularity2001 8y ago

Combine this with Millitext[0] for optimal ... readability? brevity. [0] https://advent.morr.cc/2018/17 https://advent.morr.cc/2018/17 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18702900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18702900

aworldofchange 8y ago

Definitively an attractive idea. Congratulations! But, as I read the comments, it looks to me that only experts and scientific analysis and evaluation would determine if this is something worthwhile pursuing.

lodyb 8y ago

I think it would be great to have a constant underscore over the baseline, so you can tell single characters apart (a,b,c,d) are currently impossible to distinguish if you have them printed arbitrarily on a page. Perhaps the characters could be colour coded, too? As we are not limited by having to switch out pens, why not? I think it would make reading much faster and it would be easy to disable/enable. I dislike the implementation of punctuation, I would prefer a font that uses a monospaced grid and sticks with it, so you can render the font on teeny tiny displays.

AnnoyingSwede 8y ago

This is amazing, standardizing on it now.

rekshaw 8y ago

It's a great idea and I am all for efficiency. My only worry is that the vertical alignment of the dots drastically alters the word. a,b,c,d,e are all the same exact black square, just moved up and down the vertical axis. Same with p, s, and v. It's the equivalent of python requiring precise spaces for it to work properly. I guess I should hold any comments until I actually try it properly, but that would take me years :)

dmos62 8y ago

This is so cool. I'd like to be able to change it for my needs. I'd try making vowels round, so that I'd have more visual cues.

fsiefken 8y ago

Ithkuil 2.0 (9 vowels and 29 consonants) could use a similar setup for it's writing system, but as mentioned by others should make the mapping more intuitive; using dots just because a,b,c,d,e are the first 5 letters is not.

hek2600 8y ago

Very cool. I like that text to speech works with this!

techbio 8y ago

Creating new characters? Using simple bitmaps for early letters and more complex ones for later letters, because that's really how letters are used in English. /s Maybe should have used some Gestalt design to differentiate vowels and common vs. uncommon characters. It's the difference between a QWERTY (or Dvorak) keyboard and an ABC...XYZ one.