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Learn to read a binary font by reading a story
- teeray 15y agoI've always wondered what Conway's Game of Life was trying to tell me...
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- trogdoro 15y agoHere's a shorter one. The first one is a bit long: http://dotsies.org/stories/the-runaway-couple.html http://dotsies.org/stories/the-runaway-couple.html If you have any preferences for any stories from gutenberg.org I can add those too.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- gcanyon 15y agoMaybe I'm just tired, but both of these were near-uninteligable to me even at the beginning. It could also be simply that I'm a bit compulsive about reading -- I find it impossible to gloss over even a single word that I can't puzzle out, so even the first lines stop me in my tracks even though I can read all the words but one or two. In any case, if you have the inclination, a version that started even more gently might work better for me.
- trogdoro 15y ago> if you have the inclination, a version that started even more gently might work better for me. How's this? http://dotsies.org/stories/the-runaway-couple-2.html http://dotsies.org/stories/the-runaway-couple-2.html
- xymostech 15y agoThis looks much better. I'll report back when I'm done reading.
- trogdoro 15y agoCool. Curious if others like this style better than the original link also.
- xymostech 15y agoAbout half way through, and it's going very well. I think that I mostly had a problem just understanding the letters of the original font. It's probably harder for me to convert using a normal font, but at least I can read it in general.
- trogdoro 15y agoMaybe a hybrid between the two would help?
- ricardobeat 15y agoThe other seems more effective to me. There is a clash between styles that takes away from the reading on this one.
- jared314 15y agoWhen I read that style I feel like I focus on the normal letters and ignore the new characters.
- trogdoro 15y agoYeah, I had a similar reaction. I wonder if it would be interesting to have a hybrid. Like maybe the letters could start out as Roman, then change (one at a time) into the letter-shaped dots, then change (one at a time) into just dots.
- 15y ago
- tseabrooks 15y agoAdventures of sherlock Holmes. I think single chapters might be nice.
- trogdoro 15y agoHere you go (the 1st 12 chapters): http://dotsies.org/stories/adventures-of-sherlock-holmes.html http://dotsies.org/stories/adventures-of-sherlock-holmes.htm...
- adrusi 15y agoare these programmatically generated? if so, would it be possible to get a script to make one of these from say an article scraped by instapaper?
- trogdoro 15y agoYou can grab the bookmarklet at dotsies.org to use the font on any web page. If you're referring to going gradually from letters to dots then yes, happy to post the script.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- wavephorm 15y agoFor what purpose?
- trogdoro 15y agoMostly for space-efficiency. See http://dotsies.org http://dotsies.org for a better description.
- trothamel 15y agoDotsies aren't all that space-efficient, though, when compared to regular old text. For example, in this comparison: http://i.imgur.com/Ldd70.png http://i.imgur.com/Ldd70.png I'd argue that the text on the right, in the green font, is just as readable as the dotsies, while taking up less space.
- wdewind 15y agoI don't like dotsies, but if you subtract the bottom row's area where the letters aren't, the dotsie comes out to actually around 25k.
- trogdoro 15y agoThat's probably largely because the circuits in your brain have become finely honed on latin characters, after reading letters many millions of times for many years. It's difficult to know how that image would appear to someone who was equally acclimated to both. At the moment no such person exists. One clue might be how they compare to each other after you scoot your chair back from your computer until both have become blurry. When you get far enough away that you can't distinguish anything in the green paragraph, can you see any distinguishing characteristics in the red one? You won't be able to make them out, of course, but can you see that there are light and dark areas?
- akavi 15y agoI've put about five hours in to this (The magnificent motivating power of procrastinating on something-else-you-need-to-do), and already I feel like I can identify individual dotsie words from a greater distance than I can the Roman words. So I suspect your thesis may not be entirely unfounded.
- houshuang 15y agoNot sure if this is worth the effort, but brilliant approach to learning. I've often had fun playing with inventing my own alphabets and stuff -- if you could actually learn to read this font at a decent speed, it would be fun to click a bookmarklet anytime you wanted some privacy :) I love reading, and I read pretty fast - I've often thought that the existing approach in most textbooks where they give you a short (5-10 line text) with tons of new words and grammar, and then when you're done working through that, give you a new one with a ton of new words, is non-ideal. Once I'm done learning all the new words, you should give me five pages with text that only uses the words I've already learnt, to "fix" it - and to give me a feeling of mastery...
- trogdoro 15y agoVery interesting thoughts! > it would be fun to click a bookmarklet You can grab a bookmarklet for this at dotsies.org (the blue button).
- random_letters 15y agoCould you make this bookmarklet toggle between regular/dotsies?
- trogdoro 15y agoThat could probably be done. What's the use case? Maybe if you think of a good plot for the http://dotsies.org/game http://dotsies.org/game I'll take a stab at it :)
- technolem 15y agohow's this for an idea, inspired by this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxX_bVluflo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxX_bVluflo it would be an investigation into a world that got turned into dots, or something. That way you could have lots of dotsies font all around, and a bunch of text slowly turning into dotsies for practice. You might also consider color coding the letters so that you have an additional channel of hints that you can toggle on and off. To make the reader have a more gradual slope.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- Mizza 15y agoThis is super sweet. I just did the whole thing, now I can read Dotsie!
- quink 15y agoSo... if I want the single letter 'B' by itself, it looks exactly the same as the letters A, C, D or E? In other words, 'DE' look exactly the same, without any reference, as 'AB', and there is a haphazard set of similar combinations? I'm not doing that. Learn Braille instead.
- devrim 15y agothink differently. right now our brain processes letter by letter, with dotsies it will become symbol by symbol. i'm reading it for some time, haven't had that difficulty. there will always be letters next to it anyway, easy to see the base, if you have to.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- barlo 15y agoA letter is a symbol. This is just switching to new symbols.
- trogdoro 15y agoIt sort of makes the words become symbols.
- Cushman 15y agoBit of a false dichotomy there-- you already read words as individual symbols; otherwise spellchecking wouldn't be a thing. They're just a little wider than these.
- devrim 15y agosorry i started it.. i meant perceiving a word as one symbol vs a combination of letters. that will speed up and increase the amount of information we can take in, drastically. considering we do use few thousand words max, to do 99% of our communication (sorry forgot where i read this article), learn those symbols, your eyes now can see much more at once, and brain can digest accordingly. this is a serious upgrade folks, not just saying, i've been reading dotsies for a while now, i'm dead serious, this could become what my children will read and write with..
- Patryk 15y agoWhy not stack Morse code horizontally? At least Morse code is somewhat designed to take advantage of the frequency distribution of letters (e.g., e is a single dot.)
- trogdoro 15y agoTry it out and post a link! It would be interesting to see.
- tommi 15y agoIt has been done: http://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/58144 http://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/58144
- trogdoro 15y agoInteresting! Here's a similar version that's more horizontally condensed: http://dotsies.org/morse http://dotsies.org/morse I get asked this a lot, so I threw this together just now.
- karlshea 15y agoThis seems like one of those things that will push something useful out of my head if I learn it.
- strags 15y agoAbsolutely. I stopped reading a couple of pages in because I didn't want to forget where I live.
- wxl 15y agoIn my opinion, it would make more sense to read braille by looking at it. However, it would be cool if this were some sort of alien language/hidden language in a video game or something.
- devrim 15y agogenious.. my favorite part of the day is to come home and read some dotsies since i discovered it..
- ticktock 15y agolike the matrix
- Cushman 15y agoThis seems like it could actually be a real improvement on written Latin if it adopted a real phonetic alphabet. Just transposing all of my existing graphemes for new, smaller ones seems a little silly. (And since what you're really asking is not for people to learn a new alphabet, but to learn a new symbol for every word in their lexicon, it wouldn't be that much more of a leap. Think about it.) Thinking about it-- you increase your bandwidth immediately. You can knock out /c/, /q/ and /x/ right off-- maybe a couple other consonants (/j/?) with creative digraphs (/gi/?). Use the extra bits to add in the more confusing vowels sounds, and appropriate current digraphs where they aren't confusing. Chording becomes your standard input device; just press every sound that's in the word at once and move on. Anyone would be able to type as fast as they could talk, at least, and read far faster. Text to speech and vice versa would be much easier. Machine translation would make you perfectly legible to the non-phonetically-literate, and the vastly improved typing speed would more than make up for any minor hiccups. It would be much, much easier to teach English to children and non-natives, so much so that we'd stop using letters for everyday writing. Alphabetic English would be bizarrely unintelligible within a couple generations, but again, thanks to machine translation, perfectly readable. Of course you get all of this just from having a phonetic alphabet; a concise binary representation is just icing on the cake. If your goal is to get people to read different, why not go for the grand prize?
- trogdoro 15y ago> You can knock out /c/, /q/ and /x/ right off-- maybe a couple other consonants (/j/?) with creative digraphs (/gi/?). Sounds a bit like omniglot.com/writing/franklin.htm. Franklin scrapped c, j, q, w, x, and y. The idea sounds reasonable to me. He gave up on it after a while though. I'm guessing the more differences you have, the bigger the barrier to adoption tends to be. > just press every sound that's in the word Sounds reminiscent of omniglot.com/writing/shorthand.htm. > Chording becomes your standard input device Check out http://dotsies.org/typing.html http://dotsies.org/typing.html.
- Cushman 15y agoYeah, it's been proposed before... It's pretty hard to convince everyone they should start using a new language nobody else can read. (More people now speak Klingon than Esperanto. Ouch.) I think computers change the equation, though. Machine translation would be almost impeccable. Using phonetics visually would make chording intuitive in a way it hasn't been until now... You can do a soft launch where you start out teaching people to type phonetically, but showing them alphabetic English. Gradually work into the idea that the buttons you press could be their own writing system. And the benefits would greatly reward anyone who decided to work in the system. > Check out http://dotsies.org/typing.html http://dotsies.org/typing.html. I hate to say it, but that's kinda the opposite of a chording keyboard. The idea with chording is you press symbols simultaneously to write an entire word with a single keystroke (this is how stenographers are able to type >300wpm). That looks like using multiple keys to type a single character, which is an interesting hack, but ergonomically a step back from a conventional keyboard, yeah?
- btipling 15y agoI couldn't read anything past the title.
- myf 15y agothe density reminds me of chinese
- dedward 15y agoNo that it's necessary, but I can't see any comment anywhere here or on the dotsies about numbers... Also - diacriticials. This works fine in English, but pretty much every other place that uses the latin alphabet needs to use some kind of extra marks - even if we ignore the ones that are basically de-facto unused these days.... but in spanish the ´ is rather importnat to indicate emphasis and hence meaning or past tense, the ¨ is used occasionally, and n and ñ are two different letters, rather important if you want to be saying "happy new year" instead of "happy new anus" (año = year) perhaps an alternate version for different languages? Spanish should be easy considering we only have to take into account ´ and ¨ as a diacritical - the rest "ll" and 'ñ' are taught in school as separate and distinct letters in the alphabet (as htey relate directly to pronunciation, no exceptions- ll is always a y, ñ is always like "ny" - not sure about the ¨ - it's not used often, and the difference is subtle - though possibly important - common in people's names I think, where you'd want to get it right. - have to look it up.
- trogdoro 15y agoNumbers are unaltered. Optimizing them wouldn't save much space in normal english text, since they're rare. Hey, new anus is a perfectly respectable holiday. Here are some examples of accents: http://dotsies.org/m/#%F8x+isf+%F4x+pt%F2q+xysjhh%E1 http://dotsies.org/m/#%F8x+isf+%F4x+pt%F2q+xysjhh%E1. I'm adding more to the font as they're being requested.
- channi 15y agoIt is fuckin' cool, I really liked that.
- david_ar 15y agoI really like this approach (even if I'm still not entirely convinced about the benefits of dotsies). For a while, I've had this idea of a book that starts in standard English, and gradually alters the grammar and introduces new words - so that halfway-through it's written in somewhat of a pidgin/creole language, and by the end you're reading a completely different language (e.g. French or Japanese). I'm not aware of such a thing existing, or even being feasible for that matter, but I think it would be interesting.
- jonp 15y agoI had a similar thought a while back when reading "A Clockwork Orange". On page one the slang ("droogs", "horrorshow", "moloko", ...) is rather jarring and it's not entirely clear what it all means, but over time the meaning becomes apparent.
- trogdoro 15y agoAh yes, it's fun to say those words while listening to a little of the old Ludwig Van. Maybe even a little of the old in and - alright I'll stop there.
- andolanra 15y agoSimilar: Giuseppe Peano (the mathematician) proposed that a variation of Latin be used as an international and scientific language—in particular, a version that dropped all the affixes at the end of words and relied wholly on word order instead of inflection, which he called Interlingua[1] and has since come to be known as Latino sine Flexione (Latin without inflections). His article which introduced the idea started in Latin and gradually dropped different inflections as he discussed them, so by the end, his article was written in Latino sine Flexione[2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latino_sine_flexione https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latino_sine_flexione not to be confused with the other international auxiliary language called Interlingua which is also a generic Romance language. [2]: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35803/35803-h/35803-h.htm http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35803/35803-h/35803-h.htm
- mistercow 15y ago
- ricardobeat 15y agoFor non-native english speakers, the text on the home (http://dotsies.org/ http://dotsies.org/) is a bit easier to grasp.
- nosignal 15y agoI can see this being applied in labels etc. for computer vision. Some kind of control/orientation character could make it similar to a QR code but actually readable by humans. Generally, though, if something's going to be read by both, you may as well just have a label with plain English + a QR code. No reason why it has to be readable by both.
- ricardobeat 15y agoWhat about diacritical marks? Without them it's restricted to English.
- trogdoro 15y agoHere are some accents. I'm adding them to the font as people request them at https://twitter.com/dotsiesfont https://twitter.com/dotsiesfont http://dotsies.org/m/#%F8x+isf+%F4x+pt%F2q+xysjhh%E1 http://dotsies.org/m/#%F8x+isf+%F4x+pt%F2q+xysjhh%E1
- jomohke 15y agoMissing 'ñ' and 'ü'. ¡quiero leer español!
- fr0sty 15y agoThis reminds me a great deal of Mark Twain's plan for the improvement of English Spelling: http://www.i18nguy.com/twain.html http://www.i18nguy.com/twain.html
- Someone 15y agoAttributed to Mark Twain, but unlikely to be written by him: http://www.spellingsociety.org/journals/j31/satires.php http://www.spellingsociety.org/journals/j31/satires.php http://www.spellingsociety.org/news/media/spoofs.php http://www.spellingsociety.org/news/media/spoofs.php
- pirateking 15y agoI haven't put in the time to become fluent in reading Dotsies (Dotsie?) yet, but find it fascinating. I can imagine a multitouch keyboard made for Dotsies, that could be quite a bit more efficient once learned. Has any research been done on optimizing graphemes and common words for multitouch typing?
- iM8t 15y agoAnd what about UTF-8 letters (for example ā, ž, š)? How can you make them by using dotsies?
- trogdoro 15y agoJust add the accents at the top - http://dotsies.org/m/#%F8x+isf+%F4x+pt%F2q+xysjhh%E1 http://dotsies.org/m/#%F8x+isf+%F4x+pt%F2q+xysjhh%E1
- olalonde 15y agoInteresting learning paradigm but on the "optimized for reading" side, we already have the Chinese alphabet which is probably at least as dense as dotsies.
- davidw 15y agoThe end of the story looks like 'space invaders', and I have the urge to shoot the letters.
- trogdoro 15y agoOmg, there should totally be a game like that to help people learn!
- trogdoro 15y agoOk, here's a start: http://dotsies.org/game/ http://dotsies.org/game/ You can move it around with the arrow keys. It says "alien". Now what should it do?
- trogdoro 15y agoI added some characters. Someone give me a plot!
- trogdoro 15y agoOk, now the alien can eat the other characters, but I don't know why. Anyone good at making up plots?
- polymatter 15y agoRather than alien, how about a hungry catapillar. And the hungry catapillar can only eat the next word in the sequence. Ok now it sounds like hungry a katamari. nom nom.
- bloody_pretzels 15y agoA good idea would be to make a typespeed clone: http://typespeed.sourceforge.net/ http://typespeed.sourceforge.net/ Or any kind of game where you have to type words to advance. In fact, while we're already on the Space Invaders idea, you could make a clone where the invaders represent common words and to destroy them you have to type them out. Oh, and the invaders shoot single letters or two-letter combinations which you can type out to defend against. Also, you have to defeat the invaders from bottom up and to shoot at one you have to move into it's line below it, So you have to choose between dodging by typing out an invader in a different line or defending against a shot.
- cycojesus 15y agoReminds me of Marain, the language and alphabet invented by Iain M. Banks for the Culture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture#Language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture#Language There's even a least one font available: http://danielsolisblog.blogspot.fr/2010/09/free-font-marain-script.html http://danielsolisblog.blogspot.fr/2010/09/free-font-marain-...
- tripzilch 15y agoLast time your project came up, I wanted to ask if you've done any research into the various already existing shorthand writing systems ? When I tried to find out more about those 10 years ago, a lot of sources were old and hard to find, but with a bit of persistence I found some PDFs and websites on a system called "Gregg Shorthand". Fortunately today it's right there on Wikipedia for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregg_shorthand http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregg_shorthand
- trogdoro 15y agoGreg and Pitman both look interesting - http://omniglot.com/writing/shorthand.htm http://omniglot.com/writing/shorthand.htm There's a potential to borrow some of the concepts while typing in dotsies, utilizing some of the many possible modifier keys that having the alphabet on both hands opens up (hold down c with one hand and typing h with the other hand, etc.).
- exch 15y agoThis reminds me of Elian Script[1]. It is not particularly optimized for reading but it is extremely easy to learn and become proficient in. The usual habit to develop ones own handwriting style when using this, makes it something rather unique to each individual. This also improves writing speed because you optimize the letters to suit your own writing style. We both (friend and me) use it as a form of poor-man's-cryptography for diaries and stuff we write in public (trains, buses, etc). My friend's Elian compared to mine is almost unrecognisable at first glance. But if you understand the few basic rules for the writing system, you can read either of our versions very effectively in only a short amount of time. And those rules are preposterously simple. You do not have to memorize different shapes for each letter of the alphabet. That's a definite plus. [1]: http://www.ccelian.com/concepca.html http://www.ccelian.com/concepca.html
- pepijndevos 15y agoI want to be able to read QR code by naked eye. Lets see how far I get.
- tennis 15y agoThis seems flawed in that it arbitrarily translates regular symbols into what looks like a graphic error soup. I feel like letter and di/tri-graph frequencies should have been considered, as well as conventional expectations (m looks thicker than i, f.i.).
- drobilla 15y agoThis is a very cool effort and method to teach a very silly font/language idea.