4 ms·

hold up. Representing a line, two lines, a dot, a circle... in one of several fixed positions relative to the character...that's exactly what a segmented displa

hold up. Representing a line, two lines, a dot, a circle... in one of several fixed positions relative to the character...that's exactly what a segmented display is good at. I think you may not have got what I meant by "dense". I'm looking at it from a pure information theoretic view. There's something like 5000 Chinese characters overall. Even if I could find a system of on/off segments to represent them all, I would still have to use at least 13 segments, because it takes at least 13 bits to encode 5000 possibilities. Chinese is dense in the sense that a whole 13 bits have to fit in the space of a single character. Granted diacrtics and other markers do add one or two new bits, but adding permutations isn't the same as adding complexity. Every time you learn one diacritic, you've doubled the number of letters you know how to write. Whereas in Chinese, when you learn a new character, you've learned a new character. Other commenter nailed the real technical hurdle. Context dependent spacing system. How do monotypes do it (or do those not exist)?

least 4y ago
There's certainly a finite set of combinations but in order for you to create a segmented display that isn't just a dot matrix, you need to have few enough variations that it can 1) actually encode all of the characters and their context-specific variations, 2) have segments that at least somewhat resemble the characters they are supposed to represent and 3) if they are overlapping must be able to to render all of the components of every letter distinctly. So If you have a line that you also want to be two or three dots and a hamza or some other diacritic, you need to break each segment down to the lowest common denominators. A 7-segment display works by turning on and off each of the segments in order to render a glyph that is supposed to represent English alphanumeric characters. It mostly accomplishes this, though just barely and honestly a lot of characters do not render well at all (like the lowercase "i"). How would you shape the segments in such a way that could accomplish at least that level of clarity in Arabic? I personally think that what you'd end up with would very closely resemble a dot matrix.

least 4y ago

There's certainly a finite set of combinations but in order for you to create a segmented display that isn't just a dot matrix, you need to have few enough variations that it can 1) actually encode all of the characters and their context-specific variations, 2) have segments that at least somewhat resemble the characters they are supposed to represent and 3) if they are overlapping must be able to to render all of the components of every letter distinctly. So If you have a line that you also want to be two or three dots and a hamza or some other diacritic, you need to break each segment down to the lowest common denominators. A 7-segment display works by turning on and off each of the segments in order to render a glyph that is supposed to represent English alphanumeric characters. It mostly accomplishes this, though just barely and honestly a lot of characters do not render well at all (like the lowercase "i"). How would you shape the segments in such a way that could accomplish at least that level of clarity in Arabic? I personally think that what you'd end up with would very closely resemble a dot matrix.