Definitively an attractive idea. Congratulations! But, as I read the comments, it looks to me that only experts and scientific analysis and evaluation would determine if this is something worthwhile pursuing.
Dotsies (2012)
141–150 of 204 posts
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#142The problem I see there is you think there is only English. While you may write "naïve" as "naive" and lose nothing, there are some other languages too and the advantage of Latin is that it's visual and Latin letters can be slightly changed to have something similar but different. Do you think "Fußgängerübergänge" can be read as "Fussgangerubergange" or "zażółć" as "zazolc"? (German and Polish respectively)
As a contrary to the other comments to parent, I'd say that in French and Slovak, although many people do not use accents on chat platforms and irc, they are very important in longer prose. These languages, without accents, would be very hard and slow to read. So yeah, for languages with no accents this might be fine but that's it.
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#143Why 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 al…
Because there are other languages than English.
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm impressed, If you remove the Kanji from Japanese, my reading speed goes down significantly. Though, as a native English speaker of course my English (alphabet) reading speed is faster than my Japanese (Hiragana/Katana) speed. What I do find very interesting though is that given I know all/most of the words in a Chinese dialogue, I have noticed that my Chinese reading speed is close to on-par with my English readi…
Interesting, thanks for sharing your perspective as a native English speaker and a Chinese learner. > I really wish Chinese was the international language. It's power and elegance always amazes me. Even more so as I get further into Chinese literature, poetry, culture, humor, etc. It had been a dominating language/writing system for part of Asia, and we can still find its legacy in Vietnamese, Korean, Japan. But I th…
Thanks for your perspective as well.
I initially learned traditional Chinese characters (lots of Taiwanese friends), and the traditional variant that Japanese used. Even though initially I was stubborn and would claim that traditional characters are more beautiful or pure, I have to admit that simplified Chinese is definitely a major language improvement. My one exception is I still like to write 龍 instead of 龙 :)
I agree with you that there must be a newer/better way to construct a Chinese-like writing system that isn't quite a burden to both learn as well implement in computers (fonts, etc). I.e. Words could still be built up of logic word roots , similar to current system but more consistent/logical. More advanced words could be built of simpler words. Some of my favorite examples are words like "skull" that are in Chinese 骨头 (literally "head bone"). These sorts of constructions for me as a foreigner learning Chinese are amazing. I'm able to memorize so many Chinese technical/science terms that are a pain even for natives in English.
I sometimes have imagined training a neural network to generate "word vectors" that are actually just small 32x32 colored images, just to see what they would look like. Sort of like the word2vec generations, but using images as the input and the output would be a sort of viewable "character". I also imagine "hyper-intelligent" beings developing languages like this, only with higher dimensionality of input and not only images.
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#145I think it would be great to have a constant underscore over the baseline, so you can tell single characters apart (a,b,c,d) are currently impossible to distinguish if you have them printed arbitrarily on a page.
Perhaps the characters could be colour coded, too? As we are not limited by having to switch out pens, why not? I think it would make reading much faster and it would be easy to disable/enable.
I dislike the implementation of punctuation, I would prefer a font that uses a monospaced grid and sticks with it, so you can render the font on teeny tiny displays.
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#146Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14825571 (2017, 22 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3601687 (2012, 98 comments)
I was going to post some comment about how the comments here were all overly negative for what was obviously just someone having fun. Then I read the comments in 2012. Jesus Christ. In any case, it's sad to me how when people on HN see someone having a bit of fun or messing around, their first instinct is to knock it down.
The upvotes mean that most people get that.
The comment threads, unfortunately, are subject to the tendency (perhaps common among technical people?) to point out discrepancies, gaps, claims that aren't true, and so on. I don't think it's out of a desire to knock anything down. It's just that the mind is quicker to notice those things and then there's a "hey I noticed something" impulse to report them. The intention is helpful, but these comments don't compose very well... or rather, they do: into a sourpuss mélange.
I'd love it if we could get this community to really grok the value of inquisitive or playful comments that have an opening-up effect instead of a narrowing one. That would be much better for the spirit of intellectual curiosity. Perhaps it awaits us in the evolution of the hivemind.
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#147The problem I see there is you think there is only English. While you may write "naïve" as "naive" and lose nothing, there are some other languages too and the advantage of Latin is that it's visual and Latin letters can be slightly changed to have something similar but different. Do you think "Fußgängerübergänge" can be read as "Fussgangerubergange" or "zażółć" as "zazolc"? (German and Polish respectively)
There was a thread here (found it) just the other day where Polish people specifically said "we don't use those accented characters any more because it's too hard on mobile and we don't need to" (heavy paraphrasing mine). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18688619
I see a Slovenian person claiming that, I think, but no Poles.
Also, often those "accents" are different sounds. Ș in Romanian is sh, ț is ts, ă is uh, â is a sound which is not present in English (at least not explicitly). You can get rid of them but there's definitely ambiguity. Even French has é which sounds nothing like the French e.
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#148This is amazing, standardizing on it now.
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#149I like the idea of users being able to choose the font they prefer to read in. It's not very hard to do: you could configure your browser and your code editor and maybe Kindle and be able to read in the new font 90% of the time. Can anyone who uses https://www.dyslexiefont.com/ comment on how hard it is to have it everywhere? But Dotsies seems to be solving the wrong problem: using the fewest pixels. I think the righ…
I use it (well, OpenDyslexie) as my only font on desktop Firefox and it's been ok for me for a year or thereabouts. I did use it in iOS Pocket as well but they dropped it a while back.
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#150I feel compelled to write up a summary of the comments here and responses to each one: > This is useless. Who cares? It's super cool! > This is not well-suited for use case X. Did you read the page? It's so great that someone thought of this and did it. > This has been done before. SUPER. COOL. > It's hard to read. I don't know what you aren't getting about this. > What if it implemented improvement X? I don't know,…
The website states “was created thousands of years ago, and is optimized for writing, not reading. About time for an update, no? Dotsies is optimized for reading.”, and other claims on the website, and people are not instantly convinced just because it’s free. Positivity is fine, but blind positivity is not helpful for anyone..
> Positivity is fine, but blind positivity is not helpful for anyone..
I'm with you on that one, but at this point I'd even take blind positivity over the usual constant blind negativity to anything new on HN. Maybe that's the actual remedy to that, a bit of blind positivity in every thread to counteract the immediate all-around pessimism.