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But now you've just invented new glyphs... Clearly not every letter in the canonical English script can be rectilinearized onto the 7 segment display even if t

But now you've just invented new glyphs... Clearly not every letter in the canonical English script can be rectilinearized onto the 7 segment display even if the alphabet can be encoded in 7 bits. That is a significant difference between being able to encode it and being able to represent the existing script.

IIAOPSW 5y ago
That's true but I did say "nearly every letter" not "every letter can be". The point was that 7 is a very good estimate for the number of bits needed to define the shape of a letter. We could add in a few "edge case segments" to get the rest of the way, then look at how frequently those segments are used, calculate the entropy change from Shannon's formula and refine our estimate. But that's a lot of work for something that isn't going to move the needle very far from 7.