3 ms·

That's not entirely what I meant by my question. Let me try rephrasing. Is there a thing that works on the same principle as a 7 segment display, possibly with

That's not entirely what I meant by my question. Let me try rephrasing. Is there a thing that works on the same principle as a 7 segment display, possibly with a more than 7 segments but still a manageable amount, which is designed to display Arabic characters with a similar amount of legibility?

anonu 4y ago
I've never seen anything like that. But I have seen dot matrix displays render Arabic script
junon 4y ago
I'm not an expert but I have gone down both the Arabic font creation road and the custom segmented display roads - not at the same time, of course. My understanding of Arabic is that this would be _exceedingly_ hard to generalize into individual, discrete glyphs that could not only be broken out into their own segments but then repeated in a way that makes sense. The only way I could personally think of is with matrix displays, which act more like normal displays. This is because even though it is an alphabetic script, the blending between characters is non-trivial and highly dependent on the sequence of glyphs, which causes an explosion of possible combinations depending on what's being written. That said, you can always design segmented displays that show _any_ shape or script, assuming you don't need to change them.
- IIAOPSW 4y ago
  What exactly are the character blending rules? When you say non-trivial, are we talking normal non-trivial or oops-I-embedded-a-Turing-machine-in-my-written-language non-trivial? I'm going to guess the various shifts you allude to are simple transformations for a pen-plotter, perhaps accumulating some "context" offsets to the initial position or flipping some glyph etc. Not sure how to translate that to segments, unless you can electro-mechanically adjust the segments...?...
  - junon 4y ago
    Truetype fonts are more like polygonal vector graphics, less like lines/thicknesses. You generally combine two or more characters into a single glyph via a ligature. But it doesn't end there. Fonts have a crazy number of different lookup tables that can affect how glyphs are drawn. While not Turing complete they're certainly very close. In Arabic, how the baseline blends affecting the base shape of the glyph, plus lots of kerning rules, etc. would make Arabic very difficult to replicate on a segmented display.

anonu 4y ago

I've never seen anything like that. But I have seen dot matrix displays render Arabic script

junon 4y ago

I'm not an expert but I have gone down both the Arabic font creation road and the custom segmented display roads - not at the same time, of course. My understanding of Arabic is that this would be _exceedingly_ hard to generalize into individual, discrete glyphs that could not only be broken out into their own segments but then repeated in a way that makes sense. The only way I could personally think of is with matrix displays, which act more like normal displays. This is because even though it is an alphabetic script, the blending between characters is non-trivial and highly dependent on the sequence of glyphs, which causes an explosion of possible combinations depending on what's being written. That said, you can always design segmented displays that show _any_ shape or script, assuming you don't need to change them.

IIAOPSW 4y ago
What exactly are the character blending rules? When you say non-trivial, are we talking normal non-trivial or oops-I-embedded-a-Turing-machine-in-my-written-language non-trivial? I'm going to guess the various shifts you allude to are simple transformations for a pen-plotter, perhaps accumulating some "context" offsets to the initial position or flipping some glyph etc. Not sure how to translate that to segments, unless you can electro-mechanically adjust the segments...?...
- junon 4y ago
  Truetype fonts are more like polygonal vector graphics, less like lines/thicknesses. You generally combine two or more characters into a single glyph via a ligature. But it doesn't end there. Fonts have a crazy number of different lookup tables that can affect how glyphs are drawn. While not Turing complete they're certainly very close. In Arabic, how the baseline blends affecting the base shape of the glyph, plus lots of kerning rules, etc. would make Arabic very difficult to replicate on a segmented display.