Boustrophedon
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Boustrophedon
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Re: Boustrophedon
#2[deleted]
Re: Boustrophedon
#3What was the reason for writing this way on stone? It can't be to keep text aligned - you can just walk to the left and keep going, and the text will stay aligned just as well as if you'd been writing right-to-left.
Re: Boustrophedon
#4Fun story about this: in college we had to make a barcode reader out of a simple phototransistor. To scan the barcode, you had to slide the device along a piece of paper. The barcode scanner had to be isolated from ambient light so that we'd get a good reading.
However, our project was to read a lot of information via the barcode (a paragraph of English text encoded as Code 39 or similar, can't remember the exact details), so it wouldn't fit on one line of paper. Lots of teams decided to implement complex heuristics to determine when to ignore readings when lifting the barcode reader off of the page and to scan the next line.
But we decided to use boustrophedon to generate the page with the barcodes on it so that we never had to lift the barcode scanner off of the page. You just had to scan left to right, then down one line, and then right to left.
Re: Boustrophedon
#5Re: Boustrophedon
#6I can see an advantage to having the beginning of the next line immediately beneath the end of the previous line -- it avoids a greater refocus adjustment distance to start new lines. This would greatly reduce mistakes where the nth or (n+2)th line is started by mistake instead of the (n+1)th.
However, I don't immediately see an advantage to flipping the letters across the vertical axis for each new line.
Re: Boustrophedon
#7With enough practice, I could see this being much easier to read. There's no jumping from the end of one line and searching for the next, plus each line is visually distinct from the ones immediately above and below.
I wonder how much text I would have to read like this before it felt natural?
Re: Boustrophedon
#8http://boustro.com/app
It's surprisingly difficult to stop my eyes from snapping back to the left side after each line.
Re: Boustrophedon
#9I can see an advantage to having the beginning of the next line immediately beneath the end of the previous line -- it avoids a greater refocus adjustment distance to start new lines. This would greatly reduce mistakes where the nth or (n+2)th line is started by mistake instead of the (n+1)th. However, I don't immediately see an advantage to flipping the letters across the vertical axis for each new line.
My best guess there is that flipping the letters encodes the reading direction of the line, to make it easier to pick up reading at any specific place.
Re: Boustrophedon
#10I can see an advantage to having the beginning of the next line immediately beneath the end of the previous line -- it avoids a greater refocus adjustment distance to start new lines. This would greatly reduce mistakes where the nth or (n+2)th line is started by mistake instead of the (n+1)th. However, I don't immediately see an advantage to flipping the letters across the vertical axis for each new line.
If you're interested in this concept, you might try BeeLine Reader, which uses line-wrapping color gradients to avoid the line transition errors you describe (and doesn't involve letter flipping). Disclosure: I am the founder!