4 ms·

Show HN: A custom font that displays Cistercian numerals using ligatures

171 points by bobbiechen 8mo ago

readthenotes1 8mo ago
In a high trust environment, I suppose easy addition is helpful. Probably not best used in loan agreements.
- crazygringo 8mo ago
  Fun fact: Chinese has separate "financial numerals" precisely to prevent one digit being changed to another, the way that could be easily done with regular numerals like turning 一 (1) into 三 (3) or 十 (10). A lot harder when they look like 壹, 叁, and 拾 instead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_numerals#Financial_numerals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_numerals#Financial_num...
  - lovich 8mo ago
    Neat, you made me one of the 10 thousand today.
    - ted_bunny 8mo ago
      Aaand you broke it
  - spragl 8mo ago
    Another fun fact: German registration plates use a font for which it is difficult to change one digit to another, for example by adding a bit of tape. The font is called FE-Schrift. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FE-Schrift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FE-Schrift
    - drfuchs 8mo ago
      But they left S, X, and Z rotationally symmetric, so if you choose a non-palindrome vanity plate with only those characters, you can mount it upside-down and fool plate-readers.
      - askl 8mo ago
        But at least in Germany the plates always start with some letters and end in numbers. So mounting it upside down can't result in a valid plate.
        inanutshellus 8mo ago
        Custom ("vanity") plates aren't allowed in Germany?
    - phatskat 8mo ago
      Interesting. I’ve heard that in the states, some police department plate lookup software will treat similar shapes the same. So if you search “B5-004” it will also match BS004, B5O04, etc
  - RobotToaster 8mo ago
    Interesting, is there a background to how they created the financial numerals? The standard ones seem obvious.
mmooss 8mo ago
The glyphs are really facinating; thank you. Has anyone proposed Unicode code points for them? Are there more efficient representations of numbers - or anything else - in terms of bits per glyph? The Cistercian numarals encode a bit over 13 bits per glyph, of course. Maybe forms of Chinese - though I think most words require 2 characters - or another ideographic language? But also is there anything with Cistercian cognitive efficiency? You can learn it in minutes. I wonder why the didn't make 3 into F. They follow two other patterns for 3 then 4 glyphs: 3,4,5 have hypotenuses and 6,7,9 have the short parallel line. Also, they use other glyphs that approximately match Latin letters - e.g. 9 (P), 100 (L), 900 (b), 9000 (d) - so that wouldn't deter them.
- mkotowski 8mo ago
  > Has anyone proposed Unicode code points for them? There is "Background for Unicode consideration of Cistercian numerals" (https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20290-cistercian-digits.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20290-cistercian-digits.pdf) And also one in the Under-ConScript Unicode Registry for the Private Use Area (https://www.kreativekorp.com/ucsur/ https://www.kreativekorp.com/ucsur/) (https://www.kreativekorp.com/ucsur/charts/cistercian.html https://www.kreativekorp.com/ucsur/charts/cistercian.html)
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - mmooss 8mo ago
    Thank you. > There is "Background for Unicode consideration of Cistercian numerals" (https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20290-cistercian-digits.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20290-cistercian-digits.pdf) That's the most complete summary I've seen so far, though I don't know if the author, Kirk Miller, has expertise in the area.
mmooss 8mo ago
I've thought, in other contexts too, how much easier innovation in script (in writing, glyphs, etc.) is when handwriting instead of printing text. Anyone could create their own Cistercian shorthand - and Medieval writers did use all sorts of shorthand. Print requires a pre-composed set of glyphs with exceptions that are, I suppose, expensive (i.e., custom made by the printer). Typing right now on your computer, how easily can you create a custom glyph and share it? Look what the OP must do - stretch the bounds of typeface function, something few people are equipped to do. If HN comments were hand written, each commenter could create custom glyphs on the fly. We could also draw diagrams and pictures, musical notation, draw lines pointing to different taxt from others - gloss each others comments. Thinking about it (and wandering onto a tangent): If computers could process handwriting the same way as text encodings, would that be preferrable? I can't type as fast as I write but partly because I type far more. I could do so much more with a pen; it would be interesting to try. How well do LLMs handle handwriting recognition?
- ileonichwiesz 8mo ago
  > How well do LLMs handle handwriting recognition? Pretty well for neat modern handwriting, but much worse for cursive or messier writing. They also really struggle if the text is at an angle. I have some recent experience with a project where we tried to use LLMs to digitise handwritten specimen labels from the 19th and early 20th century, and the success rate was far too low to proceed with that approach. Hallucination was also a common problem, with the output often replaced by a similar (but more common) name or word. I’d assume you could improve the results by using a model trained specifically on handwriting data sets, grounding the model, or using existing purpose-built OCR tools - but frankly that’s above my pay grade.
- voidUpdate 8mo ago
  You could just provide a canvas to draw on and share images instead of strings of characters. If you restrict it to just black and white, and crop to only the used area, it would probably compress reasonably well, but then you'd also have to deal with the fact that some people have awful handwriting, writing with a mouse is hard (I'm particularly awful at it, being a left-handed person who uses a mouse with my right hand. If I need to draw into a computer, I have to get my drawing tablet out of a drawer), you can't paste into google translate for people writing in foreign languages etc
thih9 8mo ago
> Sometimes (not always), this makes addition visual I guess this would always work with tally marks. Is there a more complex number system where visual feedback like this always works? For a taste of this in Arabic numerals consider a 7 segment font, with 1 aligned to the left; we’d have “5+1=6”.
- fluoridation 8mo ago
  They're not tally marks, it's just a different way of encoding a positional number system representation. You would get the same effect if instead of writing zeroes you left empty spaces. 2_4 + 1_3_ = 1234. If you were writing in columns you would not need the additional glyph.
  - bobbiechen 8mo ago
    (creator here) +1, the different digits add trivially as you say. I also thought it was fun that when you overlay digits, you do get 1+4=5, 1+6=7, 1+8=9, 2+6=8, and 2+7=9 . That one I only found accidentally after a bit of playing, so the demo note is more of a fun side note than a really useful property.
- Someone 8mo ago
  > I guess this would always work with tally marks. This script overlays the marks, it doesn’t put them side by side. So, in the strict sense, this does not work with tally marks. If you write a tally mark on top of another tally mark, you won’t get two tally marks. > Is there a more complex number system where visual feedback like this always works? No. The “+1” operator would have to add the encoding for the number one to whatever number you apply it to, so starting at 1, the numbers would have to grow larger every time. (Similarly, since “+2” must be identical to applying “+1” twice, it must add whatever “+1” adds twice, “+3” must do that thrice, etc)
builderhq_io 8mo ago
[flagged]
froh42 8mo ago
scnr 9900
kreelman 8mo ago
This is so neat. Thanks for putting it together. A strange number system, but interesting. It would be great if it could be done in Unicode. I'm intrigued to know what it was used for.
- RobotToaster 8mo ago
  Until relatively recently the western world didn't really agree on a numeral system. (As an aside, the western Arabic numerals we use today are quite different to the eastern Arabic numerals used in Arabic writing)
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
Nevermark 8mo ago
So interesting and clever. Hexadecimal can be done with 4 bars, representing 4 bits, on the top right = one hexadecimal digit. For four quadrants, we get 4 x 4 bits = 16 bits = 2 byte digit. 0-65,535 in one digit. A digit reduction by a factor of 4. Just a byte could be represented by a half-height vertical line, with only left and right "quadrants". A lower case number! And a 4 byte = 32 bit number could be represented with one digit, with vertical and horizontal main bars. I.e. 8 quadrants. One "digit", 0-4,294,967,295.
- carlob 8mo ago
  add some error correcting codes and you have invented some sort of qr code
- bux93 8mo ago
  You could also present 4 hexadecimal digits in a rectangle to represent values from 0000-FFFF. Currently used to display unicode characters for which your font has no glyph (the kind of tofu known as hexagana - on the wikipedia page on .notdef firefox on windows displays one with a 6-digit hex number 􏿮 )
psychoslave 8mo ago
Excellent, I’ll look back at it when I find time to progress on my own pet project of custom numeral notation. Specification: each cipher from 0 to 9 is using n+1 stroke, using only horizontal, vertical or left-bottom to right-top orientations. They also have distinctive traits that let them be identified even with only the very top or very bottom part. So 0 looks like / for example. I also went above base 10 and made enough glyph to cover a sexagesimal base. The constraints on the drawing are then looser, so to go up to 20 we had a single "\". Incidentally and funnily enough that makes the 10th glyph look like a X. Then to get up to 40 glyphs, we simply square the 20 previous ones. And the plan to reach the 60 glyphs is to have a circled variation. I’m not versed in the art of font crafting, but I would love to find someone to work in common on that one. Here is a draft with the first steps for those interested: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alternative_cipher_notation.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alternative_cipher_n...
Thorrez 8mo ago
Hmm, did the monks have no concept of 0? 0 doesn't exist in this font. However, their system can very easily support 0: just a vertical line.
- layer8 8mo ago
  Roman numerals also don’t have a zero. In Europe, use of zero only became predominant in the 16th century
  - cvoss 8mo ago
    Indeed, it was a hot topic for Shakespeare. https://theconversation.com/shakespeare-by-numbers-how-mathematical-breakthroughs-influenced-the-bards-plays-202020 https://theconversation.com/shakespeare-by-numbers-how-mathe...
- garciansmith 8mo ago
  Sometimes they would write "nil."
  - lysp 8mo ago
    So the concept of null?
    - phatskat 8mo ago
      Honestly I’ve always separated the two in my brain but never really thought about it. Nil = 0 or the absence of a quantity, null = the absence of any value at all.
      - Thorrez 8mo ago
        What do you think of Go's nil vs Java's null?

171 points by bobbiechen 8mo ago

readthenotes1 8mo ago

In a high trust environment, I suppose easy addition is helpful. Probably not best used in loan agreements.

crazygringo 8mo ago
Fun fact: Chinese has separate "financial numerals" precisely to prevent one digit being changed to another, the way that could be easily done with regular numerals like turning 一 (1) into 三 (3) or 十 (10). A lot harder when they look like 壹, 叁, and 拾 instead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_numerals#Financial_numerals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_numerals#Financial_num...
- lovich 8mo ago
  Neat, you made me one of the 10 thousand today.
  - ted_bunny 8mo ago
    Aaand you broke it
- spragl 8mo ago
  Another fun fact: German registration plates use a font for which it is difficult to change one digit to another, for example by adding a bit of tape. The font is called FE-Schrift. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FE-Schrift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FE-Schrift
  - drfuchs 8mo ago
    But they left S, X, and Z rotationally symmetric, so if you choose a non-palindrome vanity plate with only those characters, you can mount it upside-down and fool plate-readers.
    - askl 8mo ago
      But at least in Germany the plates always start with some letters and end in numbers. So mounting it upside down can't result in a valid plate.
      - inanutshellus 8mo ago
        Custom ("vanity") plates aren't allowed in Germany?
  - phatskat 8mo ago
    Interesting. I’ve heard that in the states, some police department plate lookup software will treat similar shapes the same. So if you search “B5-004” it will also match BS004, B5O04, etc
- RobotToaster 8mo ago
  Interesting, is there a background to how they created the financial numerals? The standard ones seem obvious.

mmooss 8mo ago

The glyphs are really facinating; thank you. Has anyone proposed Unicode code points for them? Are there more efficient representations of numbers - or anything else - in terms of bits per glyph? The Cistercian numarals encode a bit over 13 bits per glyph, of course. Maybe forms of Chinese - though I think most words require 2 characters - or another ideographic language? But also is there anything with Cistercian cognitive efficiency? You can learn it in minutes. I wonder why the didn't make 3 into F. They follow two other patterns for 3 then 4 glyphs: 3,4,5 have hypotenuses and 6,7,9 have the short parallel line. Also, they use other glyphs that approximately match Latin letters - e.g. 9 (P), 100 (L), 900 (b), 9000 (d) - so that wouldn't deter them.

mkotowski 8mo ago
> Has anyone proposed Unicode code points for them? There is "Background for Unicode consideration of Cistercian numerals" (https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20290-cistercian-digits.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20290-cistercian-digits.pdf) And also one in the Under-ConScript Unicode Registry for the Private Use Area (https://www.kreativekorp.com/ucsur/ https://www.kreativekorp.com/ucsur/) (https://www.kreativekorp.com/ucsur/charts/cistercian.html https://www.kreativekorp.com/ucsur/charts/cistercian.html)
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- mmooss 8mo ago
  Thank you. > There is "Background for Unicode consideration of Cistercian numerals" (https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20290-cistercian-digits.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20290-cistercian-digits.pdf) That's the most complete summary I've seen so far, though I don't know if the author, Kirk Miller, has expertise in the area.

mmooss 8mo ago

I've thought, in other contexts too, how much easier innovation in script (in writing, glyphs, etc.) is when handwriting instead of printing text. Anyone could create their own Cistercian shorthand - and Medieval writers did use all sorts of shorthand. Print requires a pre-composed set of glyphs with exceptions that are, I suppose, expensive (i.e., custom made by the printer). Typing right now on your computer, how easily can you create a custom glyph and share it? Look what the OP must do - stretch the bounds of typeface function, something few people are equipped to do. If HN comments were hand written, each commenter could create custom glyphs on the fly. We could also draw diagrams and pictures, musical notation, draw lines pointing to different taxt from others - gloss each others comments. Thinking about it (and wandering onto a tangent): If computers could process handwriting the same way as text encodings, would that be preferrable? I can't type as fast as I write but partly because I type far more. I could do so much more with a pen; it would be interesting to try. How well do LLMs handle handwriting recognition?

ileonichwiesz 8mo ago
> How well do LLMs handle handwriting recognition? Pretty well for neat modern handwriting, but much worse for cursive or messier writing. They also really struggle if the text is at an angle. I have some recent experience with a project where we tried to use LLMs to digitise handwritten specimen labels from the 19th and early 20th century, and the success rate was far too low to proceed with that approach. Hallucination was also a common problem, with the output often replaced by a similar (but more common) name or word. I’d assume you could improve the results by using a model trained specifically on handwriting data sets, grounding the model, or using existing purpose-built OCR tools - but frankly that’s above my pay grade.
voidUpdate 8mo ago
You could just provide a canvas to draw on and share images instead of strings of characters. If you restrict it to just black and white, and crop to only the used area, it would probably compress reasonably well, but then you'd also have to deal with the fact that some people have awful handwriting, writing with a mouse is hard (I'm particularly awful at it, being a left-handed person who uses a mouse with my right hand. If I need to draw into a computer, I have to get my drawing tablet out of a drawer), you can't paste into google translate for people writing in foreign languages etc

thih9 8mo ago

> Sometimes (not always), this makes addition visual I guess this would always work with tally marks. Is there a more complex number system where visual feedback like this always works? For a taste of this in Arabic numerals consider a 7 segment font, with 1 aligned to the left; we’d have “5+1=6”.

fluoridation 8mo ago
They're not tally marks, it's just a different way of encoding a positional number system representation. You would get the same effect if instead of writing zeroes you left empty spaces. 2_4 + 1_3_ = 1234. If you were writing in columns you would not need the additional glyph.
- bobbiechen 8mo ago
  (creator here) +1, the different digits add trivially as you say. I also thought it was fun that when you overlay digits, you do get 1+4=5, 1+6=7, 1+8=9, 2+6=8, and 2+7=9 . That one I only found accidentally after a bit of playing, so the demo note is more of a fun side note than a really useful property.
Someone 8mo ago
> I guess this would always work with tally marks. This script overlays the marks, it doesn’t put them side by side. So, in the strict sense, this does not work with tally marks. If you write a tally mark on top of another tally mark, you won’t get two tally marks. > Is there a more complex number system where visual feedback like this always works? No. The “+1” operator would have to add the encoding for the number one to whatever number you apply it to, so starting at 1, the numbers would have to grow larger every time. (Similarly, since “+2” must be identical to applying “+1” twice, it must add whatever “+1” adds twice, “+3” must do that thrice, etc)

builderhq_io 8mo ago

[flagged]

froh42 8mo ago

scnr 9900

kreelman 8mo ago

This is so neat. Thanks for putting it together. A strange number system, but interesting. It would be great if it could be done in Unicode. I'm intrigued to know what it was used for.

RobotToaster 8mo ago
Until relatively recently the western world didn't really agree on a numeral system. (As an aside, the western Arabic numerals we use today are quite different to the eastern Arabic numerals used in Arabic writing)

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

Nevermark 8mo ago

So interesting and clever. Hexadecimal can be done with 4 bars, representing 4 bits, on the top right = one hexadecimal digit. For four quadrants, we get 4 x 4 bits = 16 bits = 2 byte digit. 0-65,535 in one digit. A digit reduction by a factor of 4. Just a byte could be represented by a half-height vertical line, with only left and right "quadrants". A lower case number! And a 4 byte = 32 bit number could be represented with one digit, with vertical and horizontal main bars. I.e. 8 quadrants. One "digit", 0-4,294,967,295.

carlob 8mo ago
add some error correcting codes and you have invented some sort of qr code
bux93 8mo ago
You could also present 4 hexadecimal digits in a rectangle to represent values from 0000-FFFF. Currently used to display unicode characters for which your font has no glyph (the kind of tofu known as hexagana - on the wikipedia page on .notdef firefox on windows displays one with a 6-digit hex number 􏿮 )

psychoslave 8mo ago

Excellent, I’ll look back at it when I find time to progress on my own pet project of custom numeral notation. Specification: each cipher from 0 to 9 is using n+1 stroke, using only horizontal, vertical or left-bottom to right-top orientations. They also have distinctive traits that let them be identified even with only the very top or very bottom part. So 0 looks like / for example. I also went above base 10 and made enough glyph to cover a sexagesimal base. The constraints on the drawing are then looser, so to go up to 20 we had a single "\". Incidentally and funnily enough that makes the 10th glyph look like a X. Then to get up to 40 glyphs, we simply square the 20 previous ones. And the plan to reach the 60 glyphs is to have a circled variation. I’m not versed in the art of font crafting, but I would love to find someone to work in common on that one. Here is a draft with the first steps for those interested: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alternative_cipher_notation.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alternative_cipher_n...

Thorrez 8mo ago

Hmm, did the monks have no concept of 0? 0 doesn't exist in this font. However, their system can very easily support 0: just a vertical line.

layer8 8mo ago
Roman numerals also don’t have a zero. In Europe, use of zero only became predominant in the 16th century
- cvoss 8mo ago
  Indeed, it was a hot topic for Shakespeare. https://theconversation.com/shakespeare-by-numbers-how-mathematical-breakthroughs-influenced-the-bards-plays-202020 https://theconversation.com/shakespeare-by-numbers-how-mathe...
garciansmith 8mo ago
Sometimes they would write "nil."
- lysp 8mo ago
  So the concept of null?
  - phatskat 8mo ago
    Honestly I’ve always separated the two in my brain but never really thought about it. Nil = 0 or the absence of a quantity, null = the absence of any value at all.
    - Thorrez 8mo ago
      What do you think of Go's nil vs Java's null?