5 ms·

One thing I sometimes think about when I think about text layout problems is how the text we use also has a bunch of complexities that we can take for granted.

• deleted 4mo ago
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• retrac 4mo ago
  Both Latin and Chinese have been modified by the technology used to write them. When carved in stone the lines are much straighter. When written with brush or pen they became semi-cursive. When printing was introduced, they became grid-like and regular. What westerners who are passingly familiar would think of as the standard Chinese typeface - the strict square grid with straight-line characters - arises in part from printing technology. Easy to carve that into wood blocks, and easy to line up the slots into a grid. Latin was similarly morphed to fit into the realities of printing in the 1500s. And is still being morphed. Notice how numbers 123... are in-line and at the same height as the letters. That's a very modern convention, typewriter and computer influence on our orthography. Traditionally digits were more likely to appear as subscript, off-centre.
  • nagaiaida 4mo ago
    what selective pressures against oldstyle numerals with ascenders/descenders existed that wouldn't have equally applied to letterforms with those same features? (aha i have found the answer to my own question: miniaturization for fractions in phototypesetting)
    • adgjlsfhk1 4mo ago
      the other part is that numbers and symbols were very much not the priority. The printing press was for books, magazines etc. math remained hand written until the computer
      • dhosek 4mo ago
        Nope, not at all. Monotype had a special system for doing math in hot metal typesetting. With handset type it was possible, but very time-consuming. You can find typeset mathematics going back centuries before the computer. There were also (somewhat impractical) systems for setting music with metal type although engraving was more common because of the interactions of lines and symbols.
    • dhosek 4mo ago
      Not really. The selective pressure really comes well before that: Tabular presentation of numbers, whether that was log/trig tables or railroad time tables, there was a preference for uniform-width and regular height characters for those contexts (this is also why there is a number-width parameter in TT typography to enable a designer to let digits be variable-width in text but still allow tabular setting if desired).
• somat 4mo ago
  Conversely, English has a joined form(cursive) that is nearly dead because mechanical text assistance devices (first typewriters, now computers) work much better with the block form. While sad in a cultural loss sort of way the joined form only really makes sense when the text is hand written. I am not familiar with the history of Arabic typography, but I sort of assume there was an archaic block form and their current joined form is the result of many centuries of encoding hand writing practice. advanced enough that falling back to a block form is impossible with the side effect of making simple mechanical text formatting also impossible. As for Chinese derived characters. we currently are able to jam them awkwardly into our alphabet optimized structures(one code per character) but I wonder if a Chinese native encoding would look different. Would it make sense to try and represent the sub-characters present in each Chinese character in the encoding? I suspect not, Chinese works, but it also does not appear amiable to simple mechanical assistance.
  • slibhb 4mo ago
    Another wrinkle with Arabic is linguistic conservatism. Due to Islamism and the idea that Arabic is the language of of God (the Quran was written in Arabic by the supposedly illiterate prophet), Arabic has lagged behind other languages in terms of innovation. Hebrew is a closely related semitic language that simply adopted a block and cursive form. It has also been greatly simplified and friendlier towards loanwords, which has made it far easier to learn.
    • hackpelican 4mo ago
      Muslims don’t believe Arabic is the language of God. They believe that the Quran was revealed in Arabic (true). Thinking the creator of the heavens and earth only speaks one language is absurd. It also kind of implies that Muslims believe in a superiority of Arabs which is also not true. Weird to say Arabic hasn’t innovated or evolved considering the wild variety of dialects spoken in the modern world. Conflating the language with the script is also bizarre. In terms of adapting Arabic to technology, look into romanized Arabic which was used before Unicode was common.
      • 4mo ago
• qingcharles 4mo ago
  CJK languages can include vertical and RtL stretches too, to complicate matters. Here's some lyrics I made as a test: https://codepen.io/kingcharlesone/pen/GgRXLoM https://codepen.io/kingcharlesone/pen/GgRXLoM Japanese magazines usually mix three different script types on a majority of the pages like this: https://imgur.com/a/x61XbIV https://imgur.com/a/x61XbIV (In another quirk some Japanese mags open right-bound, others open left-bound)
  • jrdres 4mo ago
    Chinese apparently was originally always written vertically top-to-bottom. (And then columns would be right-to-left.) Modern Chinese just rotates everything except the characters themselves 90 degrees to the Latin order. I also read that a few Chinese texts only make sense in vertical order: one had a pun where the characters read one way as separated characters, but as stacked was also a single character pun for something like a "crumbly cookie".