Very cool. I like that text to speech works with this!
Dotsies (2012)
171–180 of 204 posts
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#172Very interesting. It's definitely more compact but I would challenge the more readable claim. If you think about how the human vision system is constructed (similar to convnets in deep learning), the brain uses a hierarchy of constructs like circles, lines, corners, etc. Recognizing letters requires the triggering of multiple layers of these constructs. A dot, and another dot 1 pixel higher or lower is easy to get co…
Yeah, the whole claim "latin letters were optimized to be written by hand" is completely bollocks. The letters are also subject to constraints that are based in reading just as you described.
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the hubris of tech people to think something like "hey, trillions of humans have collectively decided over a few thousand years that the latin alphabet hits a pretty good sweet spot in human communication. I bet they didn't consider how readable it is, though. I can do better than all of them," is wearing thin. This came up in the Robinhood checking thread a few days ago. "Do you really think that you're goin…
> hey, trillions of humans have collectively decided over a few thousand years that the latin alphabet hits a pretty good sweet spot in human communication. I bet they didn't consider how readable it is, though. I can do better than all of them I don't know all the fancy names for logical fallacies but this seems to be deliberately misrepresenting the argument. The website clearly states that the problem with the Lat…
Yeah, text on computers and phones is so much different from handwritten or even printed text. We don't have to handwrite text that often anymore, so we don't have the constraints of how accurate our hands can move. Our screens have really high resolution and color (although using a script with colors would be problematic for color blind people), so we don't have the constraints of the paper medium. There's also the simple fact that Latin isn't the only writing system in existence, so how are we to know that Latin is the best writing system out of all the writing systems already in existence? Why not hànzì? Or hangul? Or Devanagari? Or the Arabic Script? Or even Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics? There are so many different scripts that it seems weird to me to focus on the Latin Script as the "pretty good sweet spot". That seems like the much bigger hubris to me. It's not like the Latin Script was scientifically created and proven to be efficient. It just organically evolved from what came before it, whether those changes were beneficial or not. And of course again, they didn't have screens back then.
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Me too, I didn't even mean to read your comment, but as soon as my eyes saw it: boom, processed and read. like a computer without virus scan or security or anything, to see the words was to run their executable on my wetware.
I actually remember to have had severe headaches when I was something like 4 or 5 and I experienced the passage from deliberate reading and automatic reading. It was much worse being around in a car and just looking outside and unwillingly read all the signs because it added also elements of motion sickness to it...
I saw a great t-shirt at the 2006 HOPE conference that read, "Just by reading this you have given me control of piece of your brain"
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#175Why 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.
Dvorak (for example) is an attempt to optimise for english text, so it is worth it at some level. I have no idea how applicable it is to other languages.
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like what Mark Twain suggested. https://msu.edu/~jerrymc/humor/spelling.html " For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the s…
Funnily enough, that's very close to how a non-English-speaking German would probably spell English words :)
reminds me on Mark Twains love for the german language
https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#177Why 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…
My suspicion is that the way to improve legibility is to consider ways to make symbol images more robust to noise. In particular, if a symbol image were perturbed, would the context help you figure out what that symbol should be? For each letter, we can build a histogram of contexts that letter occurs in for a sufficiently large corpus. An example is the letter "o", whose occurrences in the previous sentence have the…
This doesn't preclude optimising vowels for example though, just them looking similar.
I'm not convinced I could differentiate M N and O without context, having a known vowel to differentiate the heights you're looking at would help?
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#178Why 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.
Ideally, each language should have its own alphabet/writing system that is optimized for the given language.
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#179Creating new characters? Using simple bitmaps for early letters and more complex ones for later letters, because that's really how letters are used in English. /s
Maybe should have used some Gestalt design to differentiate vowels and common vs. uncommon characters. It's the difference between a QWERTY (or Dvorak) keyboard and an ABC...XYZ one.
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#180I 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,…
I don’t understand what your definition of super cool is.