4 ms·

With all due respect, that sounds more like numerology after the fact. 7 segment font has been designed to work with 7 segment display designed to accommodate

With all due respect, that sounds more like numerology after the fact. 7 segment font has been designed to work with 7 segment display designed to accommodate a simplified-lower-density English alphabet. It's a typical engineering feat that says not much of the source alphabets/calligraphies: if you were used only to cursive, kurrent or gothic calligraphies, 7 segment is not much relevant. If you are using greek alphabet, you also get into trouble to differentiate between latin and greek characters. Not speaking of other languages representations.

IIAOPSW 5y ago
With all due respect, if every letter can be encode and letters are fungible, in what way is it lower density English? It's not lower density. The density was always this low. >It's a typical engineering feat that says not much of the source alphabets/calligraphies It says everything about alphabets/calligraphies. We could have lived in the world where each of the 26 glyphs was as unique as a frame of TV static, and there was no way to compress them down into segments or anything else. We didn't end up in that world. We also didn't end up in the world where clever engineering got each letter down to 12 segments, which is fine but still has twice as many bits in the glyph as there is information to encode. No, we ended up in the world where the "typical feat of engineering" was possible, and thus have a representation that only wastes 1.36 bits per letter. An engineer could not have willed a system of k-segments into existence and imposed it on users. An engineer cannot make things look like letters if they do not already look like letters. The 7 segments had to be the subconsciously recognized abstract form of letters this entire time. >if you were used only to cursive, kurrent or gothic calligraphies then there would be a different subconscious abstract form of the alphabet and a different near-optimal k-segment display would have been invented.
- Juliate 5y ago
  > An engineer could not have willed a system of k-segments into existence and imposed it on users. They did reduce something that existed to a lower resolution so that it fits into k-segments: how do make o (lower case o), O (upper case o), 0 (zero), D (upper case d), Q (upper case q) coexist on a 7-segment display without ambiguity? You start by deciding that lower/upper case it not important and that only one case for each letter will subsist. That's reduction. > The 7 segments had to be the subconsciously recognized abstract form of letters this entire time. There are other languages of which the scripts do not fit in this view. English Roman-derivative alphabet is not "better" because it compresses itself more into a specific-imposed compression format. https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/ https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/ from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30330144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30330144 is a perfect illustration.
  - IIAOPSW 5y ago
    >how do make o (lower case o), O (upper case o) Actually, that example is perfectly doable on 7 segments. >coexist on a 7-segment display without ambiguity? BuT WhAT AbOuT UPpEr AnD LoWEr CaSe d aND q?? No information was lost. It doesn't matter that some glyphs didn't make the cut, because those glyphs were redundant. The engineer didn't get to choose which glyphs they could safely ignore without destroying the underlying message content. That's something that is intrinsic to the underlying alphabet. Also notice I only included one copy of the 26 letters in the English alphabet bitrate. If you insist that We SHouLD hAvE CApItAl ANd LoWeR CAsE LeTTeRs then the symbol count balloons to 70. That's 6.13 bits per letter which only leaves .87 bits of code space left in a 7-seg system. It should come as no surprise the capitals won't fit. It would be miraculous if they did! I'm sure the precious CaPItAl LeTtERs can be saved by adding an extra segment or two. >There are other languages of which the scripts do not fit in this view. Are there, or has no one thought hard enough to figure out the k-segments that would work for those scripts. >English Roman-derivative alphabet is not "better" Stop putting words in my mouth. I didn't say anything about anything being better. I said that there is evolutionary pressure towards glyphs simplifying down to the minimum amount of features needed to tell them apart. There is nothing in this hypothesis that is specific to English or even specific to the 7-segment display. This is a purely information theoretic explanation for why the shape of letters evolves in such a way that eventually you could invent something like the 7 segment system.

IIAOPSW 5y ago

With all due respect, if every letter can be encode and letters are fungible, in what way is it lower density English? It's not lower density. The density was always this low. >It's a typical engineering feat that says not much of the source alphabets/calligraphies It says everything about alphabets/calligraphies. We could have lived in the world where each of the 26 glyphs was as unique as a frame of TV static, and there was no way to compress them down into segments or anything else. We didn't end up in that world. We also didn't end up in the world where clever engineering got each letter down to 12 segments, which is fine but still has twice as many bits in the glyph as there is information to encode. No, we ended up in the world where the "typical feat of engineering" was possible, and thus have a representation that only wastes 1.36 bits per letter. An engineer could not have willed a system of k-segments into existence and imposed it on users. An engineer cannot make things look like letters if they do not already look like letters. The 7 segments had to be the subconsciously recognized abstract form of letters this entire time. >if you were used only to cursive, kurrent or gothic calligraphies then there would be a different subconscious abstract form of the alphabet and a different near-optimal k-segment display would have been invented.

Juliate 5y ago
> An engineer could not have willed a system of k-segments into existence and imposed it on users. They did reduce something that existed to a lower resolution so that it fits into k-segments: how do make o (lower case o), O (upper case o), 0 (zero), D (upper case d), Q (upper case q) coexist on a 7-segment display without ambiguity? You start by deciding that lower/upper case it not important and that only one case for each letter will subsist. That's reduction. > The 7 segments had to be the subconsciously recognized abstract form of letters this entire time. There are other languages of which the scripts do not fit in this view. English Roman-derivative alphabet is not "better" because it compresses itself more into a specific-imposed compression format. https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/ https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/ from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30330144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30330144 is a perfect illustration.
- IIAOPSW 5y ago
  >how do make o (lower case o), O (upper case o) Actually, that example is perfectly doable on 7 segments. >coexist on a 7-segment display without ambiguity? BuT WhAT AbOuT UPpEr AnD LoWEr CaSe d aND q?? No information was lost. It doesn't matter that some glyphs didn't make the cut, because those glyphs were redundant. The engineer didn't get to choose which glyphs they could safely ignore without destroying the underlying message content. That's something that is intrinsic to the underlying alphabet. Also notice I only included one copy of the 26 letters in the English alphabet bitrate. If you insist that We SHouLD hAvE CApItAl ANd LoWeR CAsE LeTTeRs then the symbol count balloons to 70. That's 6.13 bits per letter which only leaves .87 bits of code space left in a 7-seg system. It should come as no surprise the capitals won't fit. It would be miraculous if they did! I'm sure the precious CaPItAl LeTtERs can be saved by adding an extra segment or two. >There are other languages of which the scripts do not fit in this view. Are there, or has no one thought hard enough to figure out the k-segments that would work for those scripts. >English Roman-derivative alphabet is not "better" Stop putting words in my mouth. I didn't say anything about anything being better. I said that there is evolutionary pressure towards glyphs simplifying down to the minimum amount of features needed to tell them apart. There is nothing in this hypothesis that is specific to English or even specific to the 7-segment display. This is a purely information theoretic explanation for why the shape of letters evolves in such a way that eventually you could invent something like the 7 segment system.