
Dotsies: Font using dots instead of letters - Optimized for reading, not writing - trogdoro
http://dotsies.org/
======
dsr_
It's optimized for nothing, as far as I can tell.

Efficiency: letter frequency is not taken into account. Internationalization:
no capital letter/lowercase distinction. No final letter forms. No
circumflexes, accents, gravures, hats, dots, umlauts... punctuation is not
specified. Physiology: no attempt to take into account how human eyes work.

If this were going to work, Braille would be a lot more popular among sighted
folk.

~~~
trogdoro
> letter frequency is not taken into account.

False.

> no capital letter/lowercase distinction

False.

> No circumflexes, accents, gravures, hats, dots, umlauts...

True, but not impossible to overcome though if you'd use your imagination.

~~~
Terretta
_> letter frequency is not taken into account._ _False._

Considering the progression of pattern through the A-Z alphabet, it's
extraordinarily unlikely this has anything to do with letter frequency. It's
instead quite clear that if the alphabet happened to be recited in a different
order, these dots would have the same progression but assigned to different
letters.

Have a look at the research behind the "fitaly" stylus keyboard for what goes
into "taking letter frequency into account".

~~~
trogdoro
With a stylus, the predominant goal is likely to keep movement to a minimum.
It may seem to you that a similar dynamic would apply to letters, but in
practice it's not the only driving factor. Other factors like the ambiguity
caused by sparseness must also be weighed.

> quite clear that if the alphabet happened to be recited in a different
> order, these dots would have the same progression but assigned to different
> letters

That is very far from clear. If you'd think for a moment, you'd probably be
able to come up with about 10 patterns that could have been used, that appear
about as deliberate. As mentioned below, mappings with and without patterns
(many more without) were considered.

If you think you've identified a better pattern, post it here. I'd be
interested in seeing it.

~~~
jiaaro
I have an idea for an improved pattern based on providing visual cues and
accounting for letter frequency:

[http://esploded.s3.amazonaws.com/anon_data/2012/eyS/-dotsie2...](http://esploded.s3.amazonaws.com/anon_data/2012/eyS/-dotsie2.gif)

Vowels touch the top and bottom of the line, visually outlining the word and
providing a sense of center (vowels also use the most dots, where consonants
are sparse)

More common consonants use smaller (sparse) dot patterns getting denser as you
get into less common (frequent) letters

More common consonants frame the center dot (to contrast the vowels which
touch the edges/outside dots) using the less centered patterns as frequency
decreases

All the glyphs fit into the 1x5 grid (the letter "Z" was 2 columns wide in the
original)

Also worth noting: where possible I tried to make the glyphs memorable ("i" is
the best example, followed by "o" and "z")

In retrospect, it may be a good idea to swap the glyphs of my current "B" for
the "Y" since y is a semi-vowel it would touch both edges, where "B" has no
reason to.

EDIT: here is a second attempt where ONLY vowels touch both edges, and Y is
swapped (and touches both edges as a semi-vowel)

[http://esploded.s3.amazonaws.com/anon_data/2012/e5YO-
dotsie3...](http://esploded.s3.amazonaws.com/anon_data/2012/e5YO-dotsie3.gif)

Thoughts?

~~~
Terretta
With a few minutes of thought and with reasons behind your choices, you've
produced a more legible system.

Regardless of OP's protestations, the diagonal one dots, two dots, etc., have
nothing to do with legibility and everything to do with alphabetic order
mirrored in dot order.

Your system has both reason and rhyme.

~~~
trogdoro
You're continuing to presume there's only one pattern, and it's the one that
was picked. To drive home the point that this isn't the case, I'll list some
out:

00001 00010 00100 01000 10000 ... 10000 01000 11000 00100 10100 ... 00001
00010 00011 00100 00101 ... 10000 11000 11100 11110 11111 ... 01111 10111
11011 11101 11110 ... 10000 11000 01000 01100 00100 ... etc.

Now, why is it implausible that one or two of the many possible mappings with
a pattern has tradeoffs about as good as the best of the many possible
mappings without a pattern? Especially when the former have the pretty
significant advantage out of the gate that the pattern makes them easier to
remember.

Note that a valid critique of the many possibly mappings without patterns
compared to the many possible mappings with patterns is that they are harder
to learn.

If you put a lot of weight on the dots visually correlating to the numbers,
see A, C, F, G, H, I, K, L, O, P, R, S, V, and X - all have a decent
correlation.

~~~
Terretta
> _Note that a valid critique of the many possibly mappings without patterns
> compared to the many possible mappings with patterns is that they are harder
> to learn._

BS. You don't read in alphabetical order. Just because you can reproduce the
dot pattern doesn't mean you've "learned" it for its purpose. That the letter
e comes between d and f is not relevant to trying to read.

~~~
trogdoro
Let's say you're looking at a letter that's the lowest dot and you've
forgotten what it is, but you remember that d is the 2nd lowest and f is the
next in the pattern (the 2 highest). For you to be right, it would have to not
occur to the average person that they can use their Sherlock Holmesian skills
of deduction to figure out they're looking at an e.

Or, of course, they could just go through the pattern in their mind until they
get to that letter, then they'd have it.

------
tiddchristopher
Typographically, this has horrible legibility: the letters are difficult to
distinguish and recognize on an individual basis. This contributes to poor
readability when the letters are grouped to form passages of text. This seems
much more about compacting information in a human-decipherable format than
creating a more readable alphabet.

There are no ascenders or descenders in a traditional sense, no contours or
apertures, and there is no stroke contrast. Also, the baseline is thrown off
in many words. Put this all together, and you have text that's miserable to
read.

This isn't even to mention the difficulty of getting readers to abandon
tradition.

In all, I'd consider this an interesting experiment, but a practical failure.

~~~
trogdoro
> letters are difficult to distinguish and recognize on an individual basis

The important part is that the words are not difficult to distinguish.

> Put this all together, and you have text that's miserable to read.

Interesting how you can come to that conclusion in a few minutes. It would be
tempting to write off Kanji if you encountered it for the first time, no? Give
it a try before you shoot it down out of hand.

~~~
yaakov34
Please explain the advantages of this over reading Braille dots (which lots of
sighted people can do already), and please explain the lack of reports by
sighted people saying "hey, I noticed that reading in Braille is faster and
easier than with the regular alphabet."

~~~
trogdoro
Look at some text in braille and look at some text in dotsies. It looks pretty
different. Dotsies letters are smashed together so the words look like shapes
of their own. If you did that with braille it would likely be confusing due to
each letter having 2 rows of dots, and it would be stretched out to about the
same proportion as normal text.

~~~
yaakov34
Now you're aiming for the laurels of hieroglyphic writing, which has kind of
lost almost every battle it fought with alphabets and syllabaries for the last
couple of thousand years. It's not even convincing that this will be a good
hieroglyphic system, let alone better than the alphabet.

~~~
trogdoro
It has characteristics of both. The words are is still made up of letters.

------
jimminy
Is this a piece of satire?

I might be able to use it, but I still feel that I would need space between
characters otherwise there is a risk of error, without needing to slow down
and make sure things are aligned properly. Also the examples make it apparent
that the font size would have to be nearly doubled for accuracy purposes.

~~~
trogdoro
Remember when you learned the ABC's and you had to use really large letters?
It's not because kid's don't have good eyesight. It's because your brain's
recognition of patterns improves with exposure. Try the example on the bottom-
left.

~~~
jimminy
Yes I remember that, but my eyes are actually adding elements to it and
creating more noise around them.

If you want to fit more information into a smaller space a script without a
1:1 relation to Latin alphabet might be better. It's almost like being asked
to learn another language, and there are already other languages with higher
information density in their character symbols.

------
nhebb
I can't tell whether this is supposed to be serious. Here's a simple test,
show someone the dot => alphabet mapping for A to E. Next, write a dot in the
middle of a plain white piece of paper and have your test subject tell you
which letter it is.

~~~
freehunter
Yeah I tried the first example (A-E) on their memorize site and was blown away
by how poorly thought out the whole thing was. It asked for the answer in
dotsies and all that came to mind was "... uh, a dot somewhere around this
region? -click- oh nope, it was up here further. How mind-numbingly
interesting."

~~~
trogdoro
If you've got a better mapping in mind, post it. It would be interesting to
see.

Many things must be taken into account beyond just where the dots seem like
they should go on the letters. However, there's a decent enough correlation on
enough of the letters that I suggest it would be pretty easy for you to
remember them. For example, A, C, F, H, I, K, O, P, R, S.

~~~
freehunter
I'm just not convinced that single dots work well without gridlines showing
their relative position on the page. Maybe it needs a better demonstration, or
maybe I'm just not getting it. I don't want to take away from your
accomplishment, I can tell a lot of thought went into it. But, like Dvorak, it
might be better, but is it better enough to put in the effort to switch?

------
yaakov34
That makes about no sense (except as really deadpan satire), the strength of
the human visual system is in "chunking" shapes, and making letters into
clouds of disconnected dots is about the last thing you want to do to it, if
you don't have to. If you do have to, there are already well-established
systems that do this (Morse code and Braille).

Teletypes switched to printing actual letters as soon as they could, even
though there were people very highly trained in reading the dots and dashes.

~~~
trogdoro
> the strength of the human visual system is in "chunking" shapes

Which is the main strong-point of dotsies. Words are more chunked together,
and appear as recognizable shapes.

> and making letters into clouds of disconnected dots

They're not disconnected. That can be easily seen by a cursory glance at
dotsies.org.

~~~
yaakov34
They sure are disconnected; you've made clouds of dots instead of continuous
shapes. Ponder the fact that a dumbbell shape is easier for a human to process
and recognize than two disconnected dots.

On the other hand, if you're on some kind of a business-school inhibition-
reduction assignment (you know, like "get up in public and say the stupidest
thing you can think of"), then you're doing well.

~~~
trogdoro
> They sure are disconnected; you've made clouds of dots instead of continuous
> shapes.

You may be looking at the table of letters, which is just for illustration,
where the letters aren't connected. But if you look at the examples you'll see
they are very much connected, and appear to form shapes.

------
gojomo
Merely black and white? Sure, writing was developed when there was just black
ink and parchment, but now even free (with service plan) handheld devices have
rich color displays.

Convert each letter into the trinary representation of its 0-based ordinal
position – 26 is conveniently close to 3^3, isn't it? Use each digit as a
scaled R/G/B value.

So for example, 'a' is letter 0, trinary 000, HTML color #000. 'g' is letter
6, trinary 020, HTML color #0F0. And so forth.

Every one of Dotsie's dots can now be a whole letter! I can fit the full text
of 'Huckleberry Finn', 'Pride and Prejudice', and 'The Adventures of Sherlock
Holmes' on my 1920x1200 monitor – and still have room for the 'Kama Sutra'!
(Free Gutenberg Project plain-text editions, of course.) Yes, it may require a
jeweler's monocle to read, but think of the space optimization.

The color-blind can join the blind in relying on braille.

------
dsr_

      " The latin alphabet (abc...) was created thousands of years ago, and is optimized for writing, not reading. "
    

... that's demonstrably false. Cuneiform is optimized for writing (with a
stylus). Gregg shorthand is optimized for writing with a pencil. The Latin
alphabet forms have lots of redundancy (though not quite enough) in 2D visual
space in order to be clearly recognized and distinguished. Lower-case is
better than upper, in most fonts.

~~~
trogdoro
Consider that before the printing press was invented, the way most words were
produced was by writing them by hand. The next time you're using a pen, ask
yourself whether the letters you're writing seem A. pretty convenient to
write, or B. difficult to write for logistical or other reasons. If you're
leaning toward A, it's no big surprise since the people who developed and
evolved it were also using a writing utensil, as with almost every other
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_System>. I make no claim about whether
it is more or less optimized than other writing systems.

People used chisel's here and there, but that has little bearing.

------
Geee
Really interesting, I don't get it why everyone is so eager to shoot this
down. Of course you can't know the benefits before you learn it. Also the pure
dots present just the base system, typography and different typefaces can
evolve from there with more aesthetics, redundancy, readability etc. I'm
definitely up for it for science/entertainment!

~~~
trogdoro
> Also the pure dots present just the base system, typography and different
> typefaces can evolve from there with more aesthetics, redundancy,
> readability

Absolutely. There could be several improvements in that way. Maybe along the
lines of turning a square of 4 dots into a circle, a line of diagonal dots
into a smooth line, etc. Some words can be drawn out pretty simply with a pen,
as if the line were passing through the positions of where the dots would be.
This is even more pie-in-the-sky than using it as a font but is fun to
speculate about, though I fear it may ruin the afternoons of a few HN
commenters to see it mentioned.

------
nwatson
if this idea has any legs at all, the first improvement will be to distinguish
vowels from consonants ... and then to make sure common letter sequences that
have particular meaning (English), -ing, -ly, -tion, un-, in-, etc., stand out
visually. I can live without upper/lower-case distinction for most reading.

and common 1- and 2- letter words need to look unambiguous when floating
independent of a readily visible base- and top-line you'd see in most longer
words.

------
marshray
I guess as a bonus anyone shoulder-surfing your screen will think you're
jacked-in to The Matrix.

------
dfc
I was surprised by the lack of research justifying the claims about the latin
alphabet and/or supporting the concept of dots. Does anyone know of any
research in this field?

~~~
breadbox
I'm not; I'd be surprised by any research that upheld any of those claims.
They sound 100% rectally extruded.

~~~
trogdoro
Never mind rectums. Try it yourself before you judge. If you're so smart, you
should be able to memorize 26 letters without much of a problem.

~~~
yew
The ease of memorizing 26 letters is as irrelevant as the age of the Latin
alphabet, really. This thing doesn't appear to have the least bit of
intersection with any research.

I suspect it's an art installation or something though. I've seen much
weirder.

~~~
trogdoro
What constitutes research? Standing in a lab in a white jacket? The best
research for testing the readability of something is to read it. Help out by
giving it a try yourself. How would Arabic look if you hadn't encountered it
before?

~~~
yew
> What constitutes research?

Gathering experimental evidence by having many different people from many
different demographics read many different things, preferably under controlled
conditions. Comparing the resulting statistics to comparable statistics
regarding other writing systems. Analyzing the interaction between the human
vision system and reading. Probably a dozen other things besides, some of
which do indeed involve lab coats.

> How would Arabic look if you hadn't encountered it before?

Probably weird. Distinguishable as a writing script, though. Your point?

Anyway, assuming you're serious:

This script is certainly more compact than the Latin alphabet. It's also
completely lacking in things like contrast, visual cues, and optimization for
letter frequency. Furthermore, it's factually incorrect that the Latin
alphabet was optimized for writing, and totally irrelevant that it was
invented thousands of years ago.

Given that we have the Latin alphabet as a well-established and imminently
functional existing standard, your argument simply aren't very convincing.
Sorry.

~~~
trogdoro
> Gathering experimental evidence by having many different people from many
> different demographics read...

Why don't I get it peer reviewed why I'm at it. Then I can post in on hacker
news in 2014.

>> How would Arabic look if you hadn't encountered it before?

> Probably weird. Distinguishable as a writing script, though. Your point?

That you probably would have found many flaws in it to point out, many of them
probably valid, in relation to what you are familiar with. You likely wouldn't
have given it the time or consideration required to discover the positive
points it may have that are discernible when using it in practice, which could
outweigh some of the negative points people enjoy focusing on at first
contact.

> It's also completely lacking in things like contrast, visual cues

On what are you basing that? Go to dotsies.org and look at the bottom-left of
the page, where you can compare the doties paragraph to the text above it.
Gradually move your chair back from your screen until you can distinguish
nothing. You'll likely see the distinguishing visual cues in the normal text
go away before those in the dotsies text, despite it taking up less than half
the space.

> your argument simply aren't very convincing. Sorry.

No apology necessary. Though, arguments on both our sides are mostly
superfluous, and arguments from those who haven't tried it are partly
speculative. The key question is whether it is useful, and that can only be
determined by trying it out.

------
jrockway
I might be convinced if I could see a list of words. The symbols are too
difficult to distinguish individually, but common words could eventually
become recognizable, perhaps.

My opinion is: if you're going to learn something enough to be fluent in it,
why not make it a real language spoken (or in this case, written) by actual
people?

And finally, I'll give the author twenty bucks if he can read arbitrary text
that I supply. (This would have to be an in-person thing.)

~~~
trogdoro
I'll take your twenty dollars any time. You in the bay area? I can read it
about %75 percent as fast as normal text, and speeding up over time.

~~~
jrockway
I'm in NYC, but I'll probably be in Mountain View in the near future. I'll let
you know; I'm good on the bet :)

~~~
trogdoro
Excellent:) I'm also trogdoro on twitter. Doing it over skype could work as
well. You could use the bookmarklet on a local html page and share your screen
so I'd have no way to know the original text.

There are only 26 letters. It's much easier than it seems. It just takes time
to build up your speed and be able to recognize smaller typefaces.

------
Arun2009
When I read something (mentally), I can see that there are two parallel
processes that take place:

1\. The "physical" aspect of mental reading - mentally sounding out the words
that are in front of me. This is quite fast already and is pretty mechanical.

2\. Converting the words into meaning and registering it in my mind. This is
the much harder task, and you actively need to focus to do this.

To see that these two are indeed parallel processes, notice that it's possible
to "read" something in your mind without any of it actually registering while
you think of something else, say a narrative about just how awesome your life
would be if X or Y were true. I often have to actively break the internal
narrative and pull myself back to focusing on what's read.

The focusing part is the real bottleneck, not the mechanical reading part.
This is painfully obvious especially when you are trying to learn information-
dense material such as Mathematics, where you have to pause to recall
definitions, follow argumentation, and so on.

------
trogdoro
I don't propose that Dotsies is without flaws or destined for any amount of
adoption. Having said that, here is my parody of the reaction the poor sap
(let's call him Marcus Librus) got who originally posted the latin alphabet on
the ancient Roman version of Hacker News (let's call it Papyrus Tidings):

Brutus Quidus: I've looked at your alleged alphabet for 30 seconds and have
discovered all of the flaws. It is clear it will never work. First off, your O
and Q are nearly impossible to distinguish. What if there's a piece of dirt on
my scroll where I put the O? It's obvious you didn't do any research.

Claudius Acerbus: Is this serious? This will never ever work. Besides the
achilles heel that if you have an N next to an I people will think it's an M,
that circle thing looks just like a D. And if you have 2 D's on top of each
other people will think it's a B! Christ! Err, wait, not born yet. You'll see!

~~~
jimminy
Even your parody is flawed.

If you go back to when the Latin Alphabet was introduced there were
approximately 100 million people in the entire world, and only a subset of a
subset would have been required to adopt this. Over nearly 3 millennia, the
Latin alphabet has been improved upon and become widely adopted by even
common-folk, to the point several billion people are familiar with it. You're
task of adoption is several magnitudes harder.

Your alternative provides no significant value over the Latin Alphabet, unless
you want to use it for a simple obfuscational encoding.

If you want to reduce the size and amount of visual information provided, look
at Kanji, mathematical syntax, or shorthand notations (although these tend to
vary by person).

Don't get so defensive. As it is it's not very good for tons of practical
purposes, many that have been pointed out here. You even said that you can't
interpret it as quickly as you can the Latin Alphabet, yet. Find a way to fix
the flaws that have been pointed out, and come back. It's a novel approach and
idea, but not practical for any use, currently.

------
csytan
If the creator happens to read this, I'd suggest upping the font size
significantly.

There's a reason children's books have such a large font. When we learn how to
read, it's much easier to focus on large single characters. Only after we
become accustomed to reading individual characters can we then start to
recognize words.

~~~
trogdoro
Very true. I recommend using Command + (or Control +) to blow up the size.
Didn't want to make it unnecessarily large by default.

~~~
onli
But you change the default to be smaller than the default (13px fixed size
font instead of the 16px the typical desktop-browser has as default). You
shouldn't mess with that even on a normal site, but especially not in this
case.

One can't recognize the dot-positions anyway, but making it smaller makes it
only harder.

------
sheraz
Christ people! This is so stupid I have to think we have been trolled with
this one.

"Optimized for writing, not reading?" You have to be kidding me, right?

Yes -- and the Romans had indoor plumbing, aquaducts, and crosswalks. All just
as antiquated as the serif.

See there? I've fed the trolls.

\-- I would love to see the brouhaha this would elicit from typophile.com.

------
switz
I always thought we could create a better language based on more efficient
grammar rules and language habits. I just don't think the rest of the world
can follow. I'm intrigued to try this out though. I'll see how it goes over
the next couple of days.

------
drobilla
Making a modern condensed character set is a nice idea, but this is a really,
really bad execution.

Many letters are the exact same shape, shifted vertically 1/5th of a character
height? A-E are completely identical but for position. This is terrible enough
to be a show-stopper on its own.

Braille has all the advantages of this, but is FAR more readable, since each
letter has its own distinct shape. You say in a different thread that "Braille
has the same proportional shortcomings as normal text". This is false. Braille
characters are a grid of a fixed number of dots (6 or 8), and every character
is the same size. It also has numbers, punctuation...

------
gavinpc
Wait, what problem does this solve? I have to agree with @nhebb in doubting
whether this can be serious.

The idea is provocative, but contains the seeds of its own destruction. If the
deficiency in Latin script is that it is (putatively) "optimized" for one
function and not another, why make the same (or rather opposite) mistake _on
purpose_?

~~~
trogdoro
> why make the same (or rather opposite) mistake on purpose?

The thought is that it's low effort to click a button on a computer to change
the font of something you're reading (vs high effort to do the analogous thing
to text you've written). The intention is to augment latin text in a small way
(you can use it when you feel like it) more so than to replace it.

> Wait, what problem does this solve?

It's helpful to consider the extremes. Let's say the convention was to
represent the "A" sound you were supposed to draw a tropical island, including
palm trees and a peaceful lagoon and a volcano. (And for the "B" sound, you
draw a herd of buffalo, etc.) We would probably all agree that the palm trees
are superfluous and should be removed. We'd probably further agree that maybe
something even simpler like just the letter "A" would be an even bigger
improvement. Desert islands take up a lot of space on paper, are a lot for the
eye to look at, and when viewed en masse are less visually recognizable than
simpler shapes.

Along that line of thinking, why not simplify even further? Whatever your
objections, you'll probably concede 2 or 3 dots is simpler than most letters.

A valid objection would be that there are some detractions that outweigh the
benefits of increased simplicity and efficiency, or that the benefits aren't
significant enough to bother with. But, I think the jury is still out on that.

~~~
gavinpc
I agree of course that it's simpler.

This reasoning reminds me of the "nutritionist" argument (as I understand it
from Michael Pollan's book _In Defense of Food_ ), in which individual
nutrients are presumed to contain _in toto_ the benefits of the foods in which
they are found. Sure, a leaf of spinach may contain some inert matter that is
irrelevant to your body from a chemical point of view. But it has not been
convincingly demonstrated (he argues) that "the good parts" can be extracted
or understood separately from the whole.

My gut reaction, and I'm sticking with it, is that this is the _reductio ad
absurdum_ of a beautiful, human mystery. But take that with a grain of sea
salt, as I was a student of "letters" before I was a hacker.

~~~
trogdoro
> This reasoning reminds me of the "nutritionist" argument

Except that in this case the before and after are both man-made.

------
pavel_lishin
Error rate seems like it would be incredibly high from a human perspective.

------
dacoinminster
trogdoro, I love this idea, but I'd suggest choosing dot combinations that
visually approximate the shape of letters where possible, For instance:

\- lower case L (l) would be a long vertical bar

\- i would be the lower two dots filled and with a dot in the second highest
position

You could then make some other common letters look like a vertical cross
section:

\- o could be the bottom dot and the middle dot

\- s could be the top, middle, and bottom dots

\- m could just be the bottom dot

\- w could just be the top dot

More complex letters could represent crossing lines as gaps. For instance:

\- t could be a vertical bar with the second highest dot empty

\- k could be a vertical bar with the middle dot empty

You could add a sixth dot underneath the normal line for letters which
commonly drop down below. For instance:

\- j could be an i with an extra dot underneath

\- p could be an o with an extra dot underneath

\- g could be an un-dotted j

\- y could be a v with an extra dot underneath

You could take advantage of certain letters which are the inverse of each
other by inverting the dots (white dots become black, and black dots become
white. For instance:

\- z could be the inverse of s

\- q could be the inverse of p (but with the lower dot still filled in)

For letters which are upside down versions of each other, just make the symbol
upside down

\- w would be an upside down m (as already shown above)

\- n would be an upside down u

You could also add an extra dot above the normal line of reading to denote
capitalization (kinda like a representation of the shift key). Doing this
would make for 7 dots total.

I'm sure that not every letter would be representable using rules like this,
but the less common letters could get the less obvious patterns.

The nice thing about doing it this way is that some words will kind of look
like the shapes we have already memorized for those words. Kind of. If you
squint.

This is a fun experiment, and I commend you for trying it. I look forward to
seeing vs 2.0 :)

~~~
trogdoro
Great ideas.

> This is a fun experiment, and I commend you for trying it. I look forward to
> seeing vs 2.0 :)

Thanks! I may code up something to let people pick different mappings and
preview how it would look on some text. If I do I'll post it on HN.

------
trogdoro
I added a link to an interface for trying your own mappings. It didn't get any
notice, so adding it here as well:

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

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trogdoro
Why high error rate? Do your own research by giving it a try. It'll only take
you a few minutes.

~~~
barrkel
Lower redundancy means higher error rate.

How would you distinguish between AAA, BBB, CCC, DDD, EEE without a baseline
of text (for example, in a headline)? Without a reference for the top and
bottom of the text, here's no way to know whether the dots are high or low.

~~~
trogdoro
A good point, but try it in practice and you'll encounter these situations
very infrequently. The adjacent words serve as a sufficient context. If the
text is by itself, a small line will suffice for a baseline.

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pg_bot
This seems like a solution in search of a problem...

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maytc
there's a problem with your font.... take 'a' with twice the pixel size with
'ff' the letters will look exactly the same.....

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chromedude
Not sure why there are so many upvotes - I don't know anybody in their right
mind who would use this.

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mwhooker
hmm, z is indistinguishable from py. (at least on my screen).

