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Dotsies (2012)

dotsies.org

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Re: Dotsies (2012)

#191

Post by trogdoro »

airesearcher wrote: post #61

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 al…

> There is probably a way to come up with dot positions that yield much nicer looking shapes.

Try it yourself!

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

Hit the "random" link a few times and you'll get an idea of the possible variations. In the Dotsies pattern, vowels are at the tops and bottoms of words. The variations can look grainy, chunky, loopy, checker-board-ish (you'll see what I mean if you try it). The version I picked is a balance that leans toward being sparse and loopy, and is one of the many variations that has an intuitive letter ordering. Here's a decent one, but with a crappy ordering.

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

Surprisingly, none of them jump out as significantly better than the others (the overly dense ones being exceptions).

[from another comment] > I am pretty sceptical that an "optimized" alphabet glyph would be one dot for a b c d e, two adjacent dots for f g h i, etc.

There are other mappings that looked marginally better to me, but I deemed picking one with a nice ordering was worth doing. A and E happen to be the 1st and 3rd most common letters, which works out if you want to lean toward the sparse end. Also O (the 4th), A, and E all stick to the top and bottom edges of words, so if you want your words to tend to have holes in the middle they are a good fit. Getting a decent mapping for the commonest letters seems to be key, but by all means, try the above link and post an alternative that you think is better.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#192

Post by trogdoro »

vokep wrote: post #6

I love the way it teaches you, but the other comments are correct. It doesn't really make sense to optimize for screen space like this. However, the teaching style along with a symbol alphabet that IS trying to solve for better legibility (without necessarily any allegiance to dyslexic fonts), could be pretty interesting. In middle school when bored once I made my own symbolic alphabet, I found it really is extremely…

> It doesn't really make sense to optimize for screen space like this. However, the teaching style along with a symbol alphabet that IS trying to solve for better legibility ...

Optimizing for legibility as opposed to screen space is a distinction that isn't very meaningful in practice. Because if words aren't legible enough, people increase the font size until they are. If something is extremely legible (like latin letters at a 40pt font size) people will naturally tend to decrease the size. So screen space and legibility are largely different labels for the same concept. With some wiggle room but not that much.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#193

Post by burke »

trogdoro wrote: post #186
burke wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notably differently, Dotsies is not heavily funded, nor does it want you to pay several digits for access. It’s just a fun experiment. It should not be held to the same standards of usefulness as a thousand-dollar juicer.

I appreciate the support :) Creator of Dotsies here. I've been using Dotsies to read books since 2012 (maybe around 100). At first on a Kindle and then on a Kobo after Amazon stopped letting you add your own fonts. I reached my normal reading speed a few years ago, and now reading it is fairly second nature. I now prefer it to normal fonts, and have the feeling that my eyes are racing unnecessarily from side to side…

I took a run at learning to read dotsies earlier in the year but I think you've just inspired me to give it a more serious attempt. Sounds fun.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#194

Post by trogdoro »

yoz-y wrote: post #142
arc2 wrote: post #118

The 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.

I added several characters to the Dotsies font for other languages in response to requests. They have accents above the dots.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#195

Post by trogdoro »

the_clarence wrote: post #105

I spent time learning it years ago. It was... useless. It’s just too small and not readable. But then chinese websites have very small fonts as well, so maybe I should have persisted. If I could watch someone reading fluently in dotsies that would really impress me.

> But then chinese websites have very small fonts as well

Right you are.

It took me a while to be able to shrink it down. You have to start large and gradually shrink it down.

> If I could watch someone reading fluently in dotsies

Any time.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#196

Post by the_clarence »

trogdoro wrote: post #195
the_clarence wrote: post #105

I spent time learning it years ago. It was... useless. It’s just too small and not readable. But then chinese websites have very small fonts as well, so maybe I should have persisted. If I could watch someone reading fluently in dotsies that would really impress me.

> But then chinese websites have very small fonts as well Right you are. It took me a while to be able to shrink it down. You have to start large and gradually shrink it down. > If I could watch someone reading fluently in dotsies Any time.

Could you make a video of that?

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#197

Post by trogdoro »

spyckie2 wrote: post #69

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 a…

I like your mapping just about as well as the Dotsies mapping. Slightly more speckled vs angular. I wish others who are finding fault with the mapping would go down this path as well. I think they would quickly realize that one mapping is (generally speaking) about as good as another, so you might as well pick one with a good order. That's why I created that page.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#198

Post by trogdoro »

bcheung wrote: post #59

There's also using multiple shades from dark to light. That might actually be easier to read if you can throw in a few light intensities are have less positional variants. 2 shades with 3 positions would be less error prone than 5 positions of only 1 shade.

I tried that, as well as with color variations. The problem that arises is when you view them at small or even medium font sizes, a black dot next to a red or gray dot just looks like a blurry black dot.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#199

Post by trogdoro »

snek wrote: post #53

It's a damn shame this font isn't properly kerned, I put it in my term and immediately started throwing up. If the dotsies form a block like they do on the site, then the numbers/punctuation is overlapping and broken.

The terminal is tricky, due to the monospace aspect. It degrades readability when the spaces between the words are as skinny as the letters, but that's what a requirement of a monospace font. One (though not perfect) workaround is to make both the spaces and the letters a little fatter. Also making the numbers readable is a challenge with monospace. I've made numbers that are more adapted to the terminal, but they could use some improvement.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#200

Post by trogdoro »

reaperducer wrote: post #5

[flagged]

Braille has many of the same properties, and it could be worthwhile to train yourself to read it visually. If you went down that path, though, I think you'd get to a point where you'd say: hmm, if I'm going to start over I might as well make the letters one column of dots, so the words are roughly square-ish and can form more visually distinct shapes. The shape of Braille words wouldn't be much of an improvement over Latin - unnecessarily long and skinny. Which is probably a good fit for a finger but less optimal for an eye. And then there's that unnecessary sixth dot.

As to the originality, most computer science students have looked at a binary versions of ascii charts at one time or another. Turning them sideways and making a font out of it isn't discovering relativity. On the other hand, even Braille had its percursors (see your Wikipedia link), and Braille users don't reject it on that account, do they?

> Silicon Valley

You're assuming I'm from Silicon Valley. I am here now, but was actually in Ohio when I came up with Dotsies :)

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