Dotsies (2012)

Why didn't the designer select dot positions based on letter frequency or letter pairing frequency in English? This could have yielded a font that would be more likely to make pretty geometric shapes. Even a simple improvement like vowels all having higher dot positions in the font, and consonants having lower positions, could be interesting. It seems that the dot positions are just based on letter position in the alphabet. There is probably a way to come up with dot positions that yield much nicer looking shapes.

The only thing that would of made your summary better is if it was written in the Dotsies font.

Yeah, it's a telling point that when we're asked to read passages of Dotsies, the font's sized up least three times (36px to 42px)—and so at least nine times the screen area taken—compared to the base 13px size used in the "How much better is it?" example.

You're going to need damn good eyes to read Dotsies at anything like 13px, and I suspect even the sharp-eyed are going to misread a lot. Size Dotsies text up to the point that people of average vision can read it as reliably as a normal font at a reasonable size, and I don't think you're going to get much, if any, greater information density.

I'm reminded of Speedtalk, a language from Robert Heinlein's story "Gulf", which had every combination of phoneme and delivery (pitch, length, etc.) represent a word in the Basic English vocabulary. So, every spoken "word" in the language is actually a full sentence. But, it takes intense futuristic training just to be able to speak vaguely intelligibly in it, because all the normal imprecisions of speaking (much less speaking in a new language) take any tiny error from "You used 'record' as a noun, but with a long 'e' and the stress on the second syllable." to "You have a hovercraft, and it's full of what???"

Now imagine trying to follow speech in such a language if the speaker's out of breath, alarmed, surrounded by background noise, etc. Just not enough redundancy for reliable communication.

Nope: automatic readers rely heavily on redundancy. QR codes are like 20% data, 80% error correction. OCR is still a difficult problem, despite the redundancy built in to the alphabet. There's no way a machine reader could tell apart characters that differ by one pixel

Tried to create a mapping that mimics positioning or spacial makeup of letters so you can "guess" more instead of looking up the letters all the time:

http://dotsies.org/design-your-own/#iaeouvxnsfrcbqlzkjwygphm...

A couple of design values:

- vowels 1 dot seems like a good plan

- ending with s / y should be easily recognizable

- tall letters should be tall (tlbdk etc)

To learn, read one word from the top paragraph and see if it "looks" like the bottom dotsies. Then gradually try to read the paragraph without looking at the next word.

Open to improvements!