5 ms·

> letter frequency is not taken into account. False. > no capital letter/lowercase distinction False. > No circumflexes, accents, gravures, hats, dots, umla

> letter frequency is not taken into account. False. > no capital letter/lowercase distinction False. > No circumflexes, accents, gravures, hats, dots, umlauts... True, but not impossible to overcome though if you'd use your imagination.

preinheimer 15y ago
Care to elaborate? I was thinking the same thing, all the vowels have a logical symbol in the pattern, as opposed to something unique or more striking.
- trogdoro 15y ago
  If you look at dotsies.org you'll see capital letters have smaller dots above them to distinguish them from lower case. Using a pattern was done to make it easier to learn, but many options (with patters and without) were tried out and rejected. Notice that the vowels all have dots at the top row or bottom, which is desirable as it tends to give words hollow shapes with negative space in them. Optimizing for space efficiency has many dimensions, too dense is not good, and too sparse is not good. There were a couple versions where the frequent letters had fewer dots and were concentrated toward the bottom, but that increased possible ambiguity between words one might mistake for being shifted up or down one dot.
  - rmk2 15y ago
    The problem with using the dots as a denotation for vowels is that that kills of any way to deal with diacritics, let alone any of the latin-1 supplement characters necessary for languages other than english. That all not considering the lack of baseline etc. Also, why is "z" the only letter with a 2-dot-width?
  - dalke 15y ago
    My computer screen gets dirty. At first I thought the small dot over the capital was a speck on my display. I tried to rub it off. I came up with this line last year: "I took a polish to the Polish readings in Reading by the nice guy from Nice." I still haven't found a word which describes two words which are spelled the same except for capitalization and which sound different.
Terretta 15y ago
> letter frequency is not taken into account. False. Considering the progression of pattern through the A-Z alphabet, it's extraordinarily unlikely this has anything to do with letter frequency. It's instead quite clear that if the alphabet happened to be recited in a different order, these dots would have the same progression but assigned to different letters. Have a look at the research behind the "fitaly" stylus keyboard for what goes into "taking letter frequency into account".
- trogdoro 15y ago
  With a stylus, the predominant goal is likely to keep movement to a minimum. It may seem to you that a similar dynamic would apply to letters, but in practice it's not the only driving factor. Other factors like the ambiguity caused by sparseness must also be weighed. > quite clear that if the alphabet happened to be recited in a different order, these dots would have the same progression but assigned to different letters That is very far from clear. If you'd think for a moment, you'd probably be able to come up with about 10 patterns that could have been used, that appear about as deliberate. As mentioned below, mappings with and without patterns (many more without) were considered. If you think you've identified a better pattern, post it here. I'd be interested in seeing it.
  - jiaaro 15y ago
    I have an idea for an improved pattern based on providing visual cues and accounting for letter frequency: http://esploded.s3.amazonaws.com/anon_data/2012/eyS/-dotsie2.gif http://esploded.s3.amazonaws.com/anon_data/2012/eyS/-dotsie2... Vowels touch the top and bottom of the line, visually outlining the word and providing a sense of center (vowels also use the most dots, where consonants are sparse) More common consonants use smaller (sparse) dot patterns getting denser as you get into less common (frequent) letters More common consonants frame the center dot (to contrast the vowels which touch the edges/outside dots) using the less centered patterns as frequency decreases All the glyphs fit into the 1x5 grid (the letter "Z" was 2 columns wide in the original) Also worth noting: where possible I tried to make the glyphs memorable ("i" is the best example, followed by "o" and "z") In retrospect, it may be a good idea to swap the glyphs of my current "B" for the "Y" since y is a semi-vowel it would touch both edges, where "B" has no reason to. EDIT: here is a second attempt where ONLY vowels touch both edges, and Y is swapped (and touches both edges as a semi-vowel) http://esploded.s3.amazonaws.com/anon_data/2012/e5YO-dotsie3.gif http://esploded.s3.amazonaws.com/anon_data/2012/e5YO-dotsie3... Thoughts?
dalke 15y ago
My imagination doesn't seem to be good enough. How should I write "Doña Ana, New Mexico is one of the few US place names with the letter 'ñ' in its official name."? I can't just drop the tilde in both cases because then it doesn't make sense. The best I can come up with is (transliterated) "Dona Ana New Mexico where the first n has a tilde over it is one of the few US place names with a tilde in its official name." That's cumbersome. Without punctuation, how do you express "eats shoots and leaves" as being different from "eats, shoots and leaves"; that being the punchline to the joke ending "Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves." (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_%26_Leaves http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_%26_Leaves )
- rhubarbquid 15y ago
  Where does "without punctuation" come in to it? They say "Numbers and punctuation aren't altered." Sure enough, the bookmarklet doesn't remove punctuation. Also, the bookmarklet seems to skip over paragraphs that have a character they can't represent. I tried it on your post and the paragraph with the 'ñ's wasn't altered.
  - trogdoro 15y ago
    Correct, punctuation is left alone since altering it would gain very little in the way of space efficiency. > the bookmarklet seems to skip over paragraphs that have a character they can't represent It's not that sophisticated. That's just due to the site's css specifying a font for some paragraphs and not others. Not sure the best way to get it to over-ride everything. I suppose it could be updated to crawl through the dom and append style attributes to all tags. Re accents etc., currently they just show as normal letters (including the accents), which really isn't that bad. Ways to improve the situation could include squeezing some of the accents in by making their slant more vertical. Re ñ and ü, they could maybe be rotated 90 degrees, or maybe put beside the letters rather than on top of them. If there's a demand for this, it wouldn't take me long to throw a couple straw-man versions of the font out there.
  - dalke 15y ago
    Indeed, I missed that. The bookmarklet doesn't work for Safari and there's no easy way to test things out. ... A-ha! I can edit the DOM directly and see the updates. It's implemented as a special font. That means I can put an ñ in the text and see the combination of dotsies and 'normal' text. I needed to increase the font so I could distinguish the ":" and make out the doties. Even with the font enlargement, it was smaller than the original text. OTOH, I could reduce the normal text by a few font sizes, so the right comparison would require getting practice with both styles and figuring out what font size feels natural, and then make the comparison. It doesn't seem worthwhile to do that.

preinheimer 15y ago

Care to elaborate? I was thinking the same thing, all the vowels have a logical symbol in the pattern, as opposed to something unique or more striking.

trogdoro 15y ago
If you look at dotsies.org you'll see capital letters have smaller dots above them to distinguish them from lower case. Using a pattern was done to make it easier to learn, but many options (with patters and without) were tried out and rejected. Notice that the vowels all have dots at the top row or bottom, which is desirable as it tends to give words hollow shapes with negative space in them. Optimizing for space efficiency has many dimensions, too dense is not good, and too sparse is not good. There were a couple versions where the frequent letters had fewer dots and were concentrated toward the bottom, but that increased possible ambiguity between words one might mistake for being shifted up or down one dot.
- rmk2 15y ago
  The problem with using the dots as a denotation for vowels is that that kills of any way to deal with diacritics, let alone any of the latin-1 supplement characters necessary for languages other than english. That all not considering the lack of baseline etc. Also, why is "z" the only letter with a 2-dot-width?
- dalke 15y ago
  My computer screen gets dirty. At first I thought the small dot over the capital was a speck on my display. I tried to rub it off. I came up with this line last year: "I took a polish to the Polish readings in Reading by the nice guy from Nice." I still haven't found a word which describes two words which are spelled the same except for capitalization and which sound different.

Terretta 15y ago

> letter frequency is not taken into account. False. Considering the progression of pattern through the A-Z alphabet, it's extraordinarily unlikely this has anything to do with letter frequency. It's instead quite clear that if the alphabet happened to be recited in a different order, these dots would have the same progression but assigned to different letters. Have a look at the research behind the "fitaly" stylus keyboard for what goes into "taking letter frequency into account".

trogdoro 15y ago
With a stylus, the predominant goal is likely to keep movement to a minimum. It may seem to you that a similar dynamic would apply to letters, but in practice it's not the only driving factor. Other factors like the ambiguity caused by sparseness must also be weighed. > quite clear that if the alphabet happened to be recited in a different order, these dots would have the same progression but assigned to different letters That is very far from clear. If you'd think for a moment, you'd probably be able to come up with about 10 patterns that could have been used, that appear about as deliberate. As mentioned below, mappings with and without patterns (many more without) were considered. If you think you've identified a better pattern, post it here. I'd be interested in seeing it.
- jiaaro 15y ago
  I have an idea for an improved pattern based on providing visual cues and accounting for letter frequency: http://esploded.s3.amazonaws.com/anon_data/2012/eyS/-dotsie2.gif http://esploded.s3.amazonaws.com/anon_data/2012/eyS/-dotsie2... Vowels touch the top and bottom of the line, visually outlining the word and providing a sense of center (vowels also use the most dots, where consonants are sparse) More common consonants use smaller (sparse) dot patterns getting denser as you get into less common (frequent) letters More common consonants frame the center dot (to contrast the vowels which touch the edges/outside dots) using the less centered patterns as frequency decreases All the glyphs fit into the 1x5 grid (the letter "Z" was 2 columns wide in the original) Also worth noting: where possible I tried to make the glyphs memorable ("i" is the best example, followed by "o" and "z") In retrospect, it may be a good idea to swap the glyphs of my current "B" for the "Y" since y is a semi-vowel it would touch both edges, where "B" has no reason to. EDIT: here is a second attempt where ONLY vowels touch both edges, and Y is swapped (and touches both edges as a semi-vowel) http://esploded.s3.amazonaws.com/anon_data/2012/e5YO-dotsie3.gif http://esploded.s3.amazonaws.com/anon_data/2012/e5YO-dotsie3... Thoughts?

dalke 15y ago

My imagination doesn't seem to be good enough. How should I write "Doña Ana, New Mexico is one of the few US place names with the letter 'ñ' in its official name."? I can't just drop the tilde in both cases because then it doesn't make sense. The best I can come up with is (transliterated) "Dona Ana New Mexico where the first n has a tilde over it is one of the few US place names with a tilde in its official name." That's cumbersome. Without punctuation, how do you express "eats shoots and leaves" as being different from "eats, shoots and leaves"; that being the punchline to the joke ending "Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves." (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_%26_Leaves http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_%26_Leaves )

rhubarbquid 15y ago
Where does "without punctuation" come in to it? They say "Numbers and punctuation aren't altered." Sure enough, the bookmarklet doesn't remove punctuation. Also, the bookmarklet seems to skip over paragraphs that have a character they can't represent. I tried it on your post and the paragraph with the 'ñ's wasn't altered.
- trogdoro 15y ago
  Correct, punctuation is left alone since altering it would gain very little in the way of space efficiency. > the bookmarklet seems to skip over paragraphs that have a character they can't represent It's not that sophisticated. That's just due to the site's css specifying a font for some paragraphs and not others. Not sure the best way to get it to over-ride everything. I suppose it could be updated to crawl through the dom and append style attributes to all tags. Re accents etc., currently they just show as normal letters (including the accents), which really isn't that bad. Ways to improve the situation could include squeezing some of the accents in by making their slant more vertical. Re ñ and ü, they could maybe be rotated 90 degrees, or maybe put beside the letters rather than on top of them. If there's a demand for this, it wouldn't take me long to throw a couple straw-man versions of the font out there.
- dalke 15y ago
  Indeed, I missed that. The bookmarklet doesn't work for Safari and there's no easy way to test things out. ... A-ha! I can edit the DOM directly and see the updates. It's implemented as a special font. That means I can put an ñ in the text and see the combination of dotsies and 'normal' text. I needed to increase the font so I could distinguish the ":" and make out the doties. Even with the font enlargement, it was smaller than the original text. OTOH, I could reduce the normal text by a few font sizes, so the right comparison would require getting practice with both styles and figuring out what font size feels natural, and then make the comparison. It doesn't seem worthwhile to do that.