6 ms·
Boustrophedon
- kjhughes 3y agoSee also ambigram, coined by Douglas Hofstadter, which is a word or phrase that also makes sense after a transformation, commonly a point rotation of 180°: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambigram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambigram Word ambigrams make fun logos.
- tomcam 3y agoFun but arguably seldom readable, methinks?
- nullc 3y agoI dunno, I think the old SUN logo is one of the finest logos that ever was.
- dredmorbius 3y agoGreat Wikipedia page with numerous examples, including the one I was going to point out, the Princess Bride DVD cover: <https://popgeeks.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/princessbride.jpg https://popgeeks.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/princessbrid...>
- lonelygirl15a 3y agoMany dot matrix printers were boustrophedonic. Also how I mow my lawn.
- FriedPickles 3y agoWhy not inkjets too?
- dahart 3y agoThey are, typically
- tomcam 3y agoBecause mowing your lawn with inkjets just doesn’t work well
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoBecause they adopted the "Gillette business model".
- pphysch 3y agoI would guess that most written languages started out this way (not enough space for my line? Impossible!), before people realized it didn't scale well for larger documents
- arxpoetica 3y agoPhilo Farnsworth, an early television Pioneer, drew from this idea. > A farm boy, his inspiration for scanning an image as a series of lines came from the back-and-forth motion used to plow a field.[1] [1] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Philo_Farnsworth https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Philo_Farnsworth
- dahart 3y agoI recently did a graphics experiment with volume rendering where I wanted to partition a grid into groups of active voxels. Imagining a Morton or Hilbert curve would be best, I compared it to row-major/scanline order and Boutrophedonic, as maybe a couple different baselines. I was very surprised to find that Boustrophedonic was the best of these in terms of minimizing volume and overlap of the groups. I was packing naively and not being careful to use powers of two, which definitely compromised the usage of Morton and Hilbert, so my result isn’t necessarily the best or generally applicable, but it was still surprising and interesting to me and some others people I discussed with, that doing it the dumb way lead to back-and-forth ordering being better than space filling curves with what seem to be more apparent locality properties. (Well, it wasn’t as surprising to the guy who suggested I should try a Boustrophedonic ordering. Maybe he experienced the same surprise earlier.)
- eeks 3y agoI find rongorongo a lot easier to read [1]. I wish kindle would support that layout mode, I could easily double my reading speed. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo
- jutrewag 3y agoRongorongo hasn’t been deciphered. Secondly, it goes LTR and RTL alternatively but also inverts the alphabets upside down. There really shouldn’t be a reason that that would be faster and easier to read.
- dang 3y agoRelated: Boustrophedon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15539373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15539373 - Oct 2017 (59 comments) Boustrophedon Order - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1547209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1547209 - July 2010 (12 comments)
- zamadatix 3y agoPresumably triggered by this conversation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35651252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35651252 which is my hint to get off HN for the weekend :).
- pengaru 3y agoThis makes me disappointed that english letters aren't all horizontally symmetric so you'd just be alternating the order of the letters within words line to line, but still writing/reading the same letter forms. Is there an established horizontally symmetric english alphabet derivative people use for creative purposes?
- tlb 3y agoNot what you're asking, but tr a-z A-Z </usr/share/dict/words | grep '^[AHIMOTUVWXY]*$' gets you a subset of English. You can say things like AHOY OTTAWA AUTOMATA! YUMMY HAM: MOUTH VOMIT. MAXIMUM YOUTH.
- gnicholas 3y agoA related technique, aiming to solve the same problem, is the BeeLine method for displaying text with line-wrapping color gradients. [1] Unlike with Boustrophedon, the return sweep (visual motion from right to left) is not eliminated, but it is assisted by colored text that flagposts where the next line is. Disclosure: I came up with the BeeLine method, which was first popularized on Hacker News. [2] 1: http://www.beelinereader.com http://www.beelinereader.com 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784
- HarryHirsch 3y agoChemists still write in this way when writing mechanisms. Here's a typical example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_mechanism#/media/File:Benzoin_condensation2.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_mechanism#/media/File...
- jshprentz 3y agoI first encountered this word in troff documentation back in the 1980s. Two examples: A Typesetter-independent TROFF by Brian W. Kernighan, 1982. https://www.hack.org/mc/texts/ditroff-kernighan.ps.gz https://www.hack.org/mc/texts/ditroff-kernighan.ps.gz Using nroff and troff on the Sun Workstation, 1986. http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/sun/sunos/3.0/800-1321-03A_Using_nroff_and_troff_on_the_Sun_Workstation_198602.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/sun/sunos/3.0/800-1321-03A_Usin...
- mav88 3y agoFirst came across this word in Godel, Escher, Bach.
- edgineer 3y agoMy Latin teacher would sometimes describe words like this. In this case he said if a person were writing a long sentence along a mountainside, rather than walk all the way back to begin a new line they'd do this. I have always wanted a list of these interesting words that relate to grammar or linguistics. I can ask GPT for some, like "epenthesis" and "apocope" and "epanalepsis," but here's hoping someone will point me to a compendium.