
Dotsies (2012) - severine
http://dotsies.org/
======
StavrosK
I 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 didn't write it. Maybe the author would appreciate the
suggestion!

~~~
jeremyw
I feel like HN should implement a "positive-only" or "constructive-only" flag
for posts, whether set by posters or moderators. Perhaps all Show HN. Start to
experiment, see what sticks.

~~~
TomMckenny
It is a pity an intellectually curious person's work posted to a forum of
presumably intellectually curious people gets a bit beat up.

George Bernard Shaw worked out a new alphabet too. Tolkien built a language
for books about goblins and elves. I can't image how they would be greeted.
But perhaps it's just a bad day or hour or something.

~~~
umanwizard
Tolkien did not claim that his invented language was better than English and
should replace it.

------
Procrastes
I believe it was an HN thread years ago where I first discovered Dotsies. I
spent a very satisfying afternoon learning to read it and write it. I then
labelled all sorts of cables and patch boards and such with it around my
cubicle for fun. I only kept them up for a few days, but it was a blast
learning to read something cryptic and cool looking at a glance with so little
effort. If only for that idle distraction Dotsies is a worthy hack. I really
think half the fun is in the teaching method.

~~~
shdon
It is fun. I actually used (and still use) the "Standard Galactic Alphabet"
from the Commander Keen games every once in a while, which is a little easier
to read and write, yet almost as baffling to non-insiders :)

------
bcheung
Very 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 conflated.
There's going to be a high degree of uncertainty. We have a hard enough time
distinguishing '1' and 'l', and 'O' and '0'. This makes it so every letter
takes on that trait. We usually must rely on context of the surrounding
letters and words to fill in the missing information.

I think the concept of this idea is valid, but we need more than moving pixels
up and down to distinguish letters. If instead a form existed that mixed
various small primitive shapes it might work.

I'm not an expert on the vision system but I would think, sticking to at most
2 different locations instead of 5, and mixing in vertical lines, horizontal
lines, diagonals, corners, and circles might be work exploring.

There's also color but lots of people are color blind.

~~~
qlk1123
> I'm not an expert on the vision system but I would think, sticking to at
> most 2 different locations instead of 5, and mixing in vertical lines,
> horizontal lines, diagonals, corners, and circles might be work exploring.

What you proposed here turns out very similar to the elements of Korean
Characters.

As an East Asian who is native to Chinese Characters, two-dimensional symbols
are always more appealing to me. I started to learn English 25 years ago while
Japanese 10, but I read Japanese much more faster than English even without
any Kanji.

~~~
KennyCason
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 reading speed. I find Chinese _very_ efficient
to read/parse. I think there are many factors that contribute to this such as
well defined word roots, similar sized characters, relatively small number of
radicals (larger than alphabet of course), very simple/clean grammar. The more
I study, learn, and use Chinese, 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.

I've studied Japanese/Chinese both for a long time (10-15 years). Nowadays, I
use Chinese everyday as that's the language my wife and I use.

As a _pure_ alphabet goes, I really like the Korean implementation. I was able
to mostly learn and retain it with only 1-2 hours of study.

~~~
qlk1123
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 think "legacy" is the keyword here. As a software engineer, the Chinese
writing system is not in a ideal shape at least for me. There used to be
systematic ways/principles to create characters, but there has never been any
sustainable approach to "maintain" some of the internal consistency. It's like
stacking workarounds one after another, and it becomes what we see today.
Users can just accept it without any efficient way to modify or even refactor
it, not mentioning the burden and effort to create just one beautiful font
design.

~~~
KennyCason
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.

~~~
qlk1123
> 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 :)

Improvement or not? I argue that it depends. Once in an international
situation, Mr. Xi wanted to speak a seldom-used and very old idiom in his
draft, which was "通商宽农", roughly standing for the meaning that farmers (农) can
live much better (宽) if economy is getting good. However, he spoke it as
"通商宽衣"， which is not a established phrase but can still be reasoned as "get
economy better and get undressed (宽衣)"。

As a reference, the traditional version of this idiom is "通商寬農"。"農" (farmer,
agriculture) has a very different shape compared to "衣" (cloth, surface) in
traditional Chinese, but obviously they looks similar when you become a
important but nervous guy.

If we regard the Chinese language/writing system as a huge project, I would
say that simplified Chinese was a hard fork without much testing but soon
widely adopted, and its design was based on some novel but destructive
compression algorithm without any peer review process.

> 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. ...

Cool idea! Sounds like some kind of esoteric language. Looking forward to it.

~~~
KennyCason
Haha that’s a great example. Those are definitely areas where the written
language has room for improvement. I could also imagine myself making a
similar mistake.

Regardless, I’ve always been impressed that the Chinese can make such a bold
change as their written language yet here in the United States, I’m still
arguing with people who don’t know how many feet are in a mile as to why we
should switch to metric. :)

If I ever get around to making my “hyper language”, I’ll be sure to post or
let you know. I imagine it will likely be “not-very-user-friendly”. haha

------
nine_k
Problems that I immediately see with the approach:

* No baseline or other orienting structure, so vertical shifts easily change meaning ("ab" turns to "bc"), same for rotations.

* No redundancy to allow for recognizing incomplete / garbled / damaged letters.

Both features are prominent in any machine-readable encoding (like bar codes
or QR codes), and are relatively easy to find in any human script.

The idea behind making more compact visual representation of letters has
merit. This particular implementation of it is impractical, though. It only
looks acceptable on a demo page.

(While at it, I know two well-designed phonetic writing systems: Tengwar and
Hangul. Neither is super compact, but both are easy to learn and read, because
of the internal logic. Dotsies are way more arbitrary; they don't exploit any
connections between letter or sounds they represent.)

~~~
beizhia
There's also Shavian and Quikscript for English, which handle the language
phonetically. I think it's a big miss for any new writing system to keep a
language with 38 or so sounds limited to 26 letters. Not to mention other
languages that might want to use it.

~~~
mkl
I learned Shavian a few years ago, with my own transliteration dictionary
based on my New Zealand English pronunciation (which Shavian doesn't quite
seem to handle all of). Unfortunately, different dialects of English have very
(inconsistently) different pronunciations, and hence there would be many
different spellings for the same words; I really struggled to read Shavian
written by people from other parts of the world. Going phonetic may well mean
giving up on fast reading through whole word recognition.

~~~
idle_zealot
Or it would require standardizing on certain pronunciations.

~~~
cezart
My native language, Romanian, is written exactly as it is heard. Dialects with
differing pronunciations still exist. In practice, everyone who speaks in
dialect, writes the words as if transliterated from the official
pronunciations (which is taught in schools), but pronounces the words as
they're used. So in writing everyone gets each other. Orally, it can be a bit
difficult sometimes.

~~~
idle_zealot
This is what I meant to suggest. Pick a canonical set of pronunciations to be
used in writing.

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

~~~
jpfed
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 following contexts: f_r (twice),
t_g, c_n, _c, c_r.

Each letter's context histograms have some similarity with each other
letter's. We want different letters that have similar contexts to have widely
_differing_ appearances, because if their appearances were similar, their
contexts will be of less help to the reader in disambiguating. And letters
with sufficiently different contexts may be allowed to be more similar in
appearance (note e.g. the archaic long "s", which despite visual ſimilarity to
"f" is easily distinguished from it by the different contexts it appears in).

~~~
blueblimp
That's a very interesting point and suggests that, counterintuitively, it
would actually be bad for (for example) vowels to look similar to each other.

Another way to use language statistics would be to make the font variable-
width (which may help with legibility) but make commonly-occurring letters
thin.

------
vokep
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 easy to learn a new symbol set for language you already
know, so, changing away from the traditional symbols isn't even that massive
of an endeavor.

I think they did do an OK job with using screen space well, but at the cost of
legibility to a degree. That said, the more I think on it, maybe the author
did too. Sure, individual letters aren't as legible, but the point is almost
more that words become single characters, more like Mandarin. If those
characters are legible, than it doesn't matter that the individual letters are
not. If you don't know a word, you're already going to be individually
inspecting the letters. (of course, it will still be mildly more difficult
with dotsies)

~~~
retreatguru
This was my favourite aspect of dotsies: that words began to have familiar
shapes. I stopped needing to parse certain words because their shape was so
unique and memorable.

At the same time it would be interesting to see it implemented based on letter
frequency rather than order in the alphabet.

It was great fun to read!

~~~
Ndymium
Isn't that true for "normal" text too? Don't we skim text usually pretty
quickly based on how the words look like, instead of reading every letter one
by one?

~~~
p1esk
Same is true for morse code sound patterns.

------
tlb
I 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/](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 right problem is being able to skim large amounts of text quickly,
for which typical fonts are pretty good. You can find whether there are any
numbers on a page, for instance, in well under a second.

~~~
zimpenfish
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.

------
merricksb
Previous discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14825571](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14825571)
(2017, 22 comments)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3601687](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3601687)
(2012, 98 comments)

~~~
johnfn
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.

~~~
umanwizard
The website is not presenting this as just having fun, but rather making the
strong claim that it is actually _better_ than the writing system we've been
using.

Making such very strong claims ("I've come up with something better than what
civilization has produced thus far...") naturally invites debate, especially
when they seem implausible on their face and aren't backed up by a very solid
argument. There would be a lot fewer negative comments if this were presented
like "hey, look at this neat game I made up..."

~~~
johnfn
I’m not seeing your quote on the page, and I think that drives my point home:
you have created a narrative for the post that doesn’t exist. I mean, come on.
They’re called “dotsies”! Does that sound like the name of a font designed to
replace ours, by someone who honestly thinks they’ve advanced civilization? Or
does it sound like someone having fun?

~~~
umanwizard
> The latin alphabet (abc...) was created thousands of years ago, and is
> optimized for writing, not reading. About time for an update, no?

~~~
johnfn
See, it depends how charitable you want to be to the author, because I read
that in a bit of a joking tone.

------
tedunangst
On a barely more productive note, 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. How likely is it that alphabetical order also happens to be the best dot
pattern?

~~~
roryokane
This question is discussed further in this thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18704204](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18704204).
The author trogdoro has replied there.

------
pavel_lishin
One advantage of regular letters compared to this is that it's pretty easy to
tell that even a fairly mangled A is still an A; a word written in dotsies
loses a lot of its legibility as soon as it's not displayed in fairly large
pixels across a very clear background. Viewing things at an angle? While it
moves by? On a dirty or wet piece of paper? Forget about it.

It's a super fun idea, though. I would 100% put this in the background, or
even the foreground, of some future scifi scape.

~~~
Semiapies
Yeah, it's a telling point that when we're asked to read passages of Dotsies,
the font's sized up least three times (36px to 42px)—and so at least nine
times the screen area taken—compared to the base 13px size used in the "How
much better is it?" example.

You're going to need damn good eyes to read Dotsies at anything like 13px, and
I suspect even the sharp-eyed are going to misread a lot. Size Dotsies text up
to the point that people of average vision can read it as reliably as a normal
font at a reasonable size, and I don't think you're going to get much, if any,
greater information density.

I'm reminded of Speedtalk, a language from Robert Heinlein's story "Gulf",
which had every combination of phoneme and delivery (pitch, length, etc.)
represent a word in the Basic English vocabulary. So, every spoken "word" in
the language is actually a full sentence. But, it takes intense futuristic
training just to be able to speak vaguely intelligibly in it, because all the
normal imprecisions of speaking (much less speaking in a new language) take
any tiny error from "You used 'record' as a noun, but with a long 'e' and the
stress on the second syllable." to "You have a _hovercraft_ , and it's full of
_what???_ "

Now imagine trying to follow speech in such a language if the speaker's out of
breath, alarmed, surrounded by background noise, etc. Just not enough
redundancy for reliable communication.

~~~
Vendan
Eels. My hovercraft is full of eels.

[http://www.omniglot.com/language/phrases/hovercraft.htm](http://www.omniglot.com/language/phrases/hovercraft.htm)

~~~
Semiapies
That's the reference, yes.

------
neurobashing
The first thing I thought of was Marain, from The Culture novels
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture):

“Designed to be represented either in binary or symbol-written form, Marain is
also regarded as an aesthetically pleasing language by the Culture. The
symbols of the Marain alphabet can be displayed in three-by-three grids of
binary (yes/no, black/white) dots and thus correspond to nine-bit wide binary
numbers.”

~~~
bencollier49
Came here to say the same thing. Interesting to see that someone has
(independently?) had the same sort of idea.

~~~
cpeterso
Me too. :)

Here are some examples of Marain symbols designed by Iain M. Banks:

[http://trevor-hopkins.com/banks/a-few-notes-on-marain.html](http://trevor-
hopkins.com/banks/a-few-notes-on-marain.html)

------
billconan
just use Chinese, it’s optimized for screen space (each character occupies a
square, and has complex meaning of a word, and people read their shapes,
rather than stroke by stroke )

~~~
qlk1123
>just use Chinese, it’s optimized for screen space ...

[cite needed][original research?]

~~~
birracerveza
Well, for example, per Google Translate

Automobile

汽车

Reading chinese is basically the human version of attempting to read a .zip
file.

------
SSchick
This reminds me of the fonts used in Stargate: Atlantis
[https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/ancients.htm](https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/ancients.htm)

------
spyckie2
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...](http://dotsies.org/design-your-
own/#iaeouvxnsfrcbqlzkjwygphmdt)

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 and see if it "looks" like the
bottom dotsies. Then gradually try to read the paragraph without looking at
the next word.

Open to improvements!

~~~
trogdoro
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.

------
arc2
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)

~~~
yoz-y
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.

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

------
nabla9
As others have pointed out, this is not ideal. At least it requires lots of
work.

If we could start from the scratch, Hangul style syllabic blocks that combine
alphabetic and syllabic systems might be the ideal.

------
the_clarence
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.

~~~
trogdoro
> 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.

~~~
the_clarence
Could you make a video of that?

------
userbinator
This reminds me of the old " _real_ programmers use binary" meme, and how I
experimented with bitmap image files by typing text into them and looking at
the resulting patterns.

I wonder if I'm the only one who would find it _easier_ to read if it was just
ASCII printed in binary instead of its own symbol-set. ASCII has some patterns
which make it easy to memorise, and it's something a lot of developers have
indeed memorised already. That would make a great "1337 hax0r" font.

...and why not go the whole hog and make it 8 bits, so you can encode all of
Unicode (as UTF-8)...

------
caf
I am still not sure if this is an elaborate satire or not.

------
xenadu02
If you want a quick and easy way to compress the visual space taken up by text
then we have several existing examples to choose from.

The most trivial is omission of vowels, instead relying on context or vowel
marks (or some combination). Wrds r srprsngl lgbl wtht vwls.
Anotherisomissionofspaces.

Lots of western (and other) scripts have been written these ways in the past.
Neither can be said to have evolved to make text easier to write! Including
the vowels is more difficult to write and both are more costly because they
take up more space, which means larger tablets or more animal skin and ink
required.

We settled on including vowels and word spacing to make text more legible, so
I'm not sure where the author's claim about latin working the way it does to
benefit writing comes from. If the OP wants to claim letters like b/d/p/q,
m/n, w/v/u, etc are to the benefit of writers OK but "dotsies" is even worse
in lacking distinct shapes.

Humans like symmetry and patterns so it seems far more likely some letters are
variations on a pattern or mirror images because it is visually pleasing or
easy to stamp new letters out of existing known shapes. If you think about it
a/b/c/d/e/g/o/p/q are arguably variations on the same pattern, with g -> j,
and j -> i following.

------
singularity2001
Combine this with Millitext[0] for optimal ... readability? brevity.

[0] [https://advent.morr.cc/2018/17](https://advent.morr.cc/2018/17)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18702900](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18702900)

------
GolDDranks
I think this is a funny and cool idea, but there's quite big flaw: it doesn't
have a clear baseline. Without context, "ABBA" basically looks identical to
"DEED".

Also, if you go so far to create a new alphabet, you could also make it
phonetic. Rather than this one, I'd like to see a phonetic syllable alphabet
(like the Korean one) for English.

~~~
SkyMarshal
I was thinking the same thing re: phonetic. Dotsies opening paragraph claims
the latin alphabet was optimized for writing, but it wasn't, it was optimized
for phonetics (if anything at all), which is useful to both reading and
writing. However, we know from Korean and Japanese Katakana/Hiragana that
phonetics can be generalized into syllables and don't have to be spelled out
as in English/Latin. A Dotsies version of that would be ideal.

------
deegles
I once managed to install the Dotsies font to a rooted Android... it was fun
for about 10 minutes! I agree with the other comments that a font more focused
on overall word shape would probably be easier to read at high speed.

------
pqhwan
Interesting, similar to how the korean alphabet works; letters are composed
into syllabic units. “Lol,” for example, is 롤, which is a combination of ㄹ + ㅗ
+ ㄹ. It’s easy to see how they match up with their latin counterparts.

------
lodyb
I 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.

------
Koshkin
Love it! Could be used for printing a novel on a single page at 600 dpi.

------
rekshaw
It's a great idea and I am all for efficiency. My only worry is that the
vertical alignment of the dots drastically alters the word. a,b,c,d,e are all
the same exact black square, just moved up and down the vertical axis. Same
with p, s, and v. It's the equivalent of python requiring precise spaces for
it to work properly.

I guess I should hold any comments until I actually try it properly, but that
would take me years :)

------
bredren
When watching sci-fi films like Prospect that feature strange character
systems, I often wonder how we might have turned toward something like that to
label ships and stuff. (Presuming no alien cultural injection)

And then I see this, and despite some of the valid criticism of this
particular set I now understand how english or some other recognizable written
language might not be a guarantee for labeling in the future.

------
Koshkin
I think Hebrew alphabet is more economical than this.

------
tasty_freeze
Being well past my likely mid-life point, and having been a user of glasses
for the past 40 years, I do not appreciate the font at all.

------
techbio
Creating 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.

------
ziffusion
Is this person completely insane? Or am I just not getting something? In which
universe is this font remotely useful?

~~~
lumberjack
It's like DVORAK but for reading. The ambition is noble.

~~~
snuxoll
DVORAK isn’t useless though, it’s the only reason I was able to learn touch
typing.

------
gallerdude
Only hackers would try to reimplement the alphabet. I can't decide whether I
should be proud or embarrassed.

~~~
StavrosK
Definitely proud. Why embarrassed?

~~~
hoorayimhelping
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 going to outsmart a financial institution that employs
people like you (but smarter) because you happen to be better at math than
your facebook friends who studied polysci?" The hubris of people in tech who
think they're the only people who notice things is getting really tiresome.

Having said that, I think that's a slippery slope of a stance to take, because
it stifles creativity and novel solutions, which history shows often come up
when they're not looked for. But I think that's kind of the sentiment of
embarrassment they were expressing: "groan, another techie is going to disrupt
something that doesn't need disrupting."

Edit: To the people responding to this (and downvoting): this person asked for
an explanation for why someone would feel embarrassment at this. I was trying
to give what I thought was a reasonable explanation. I don't actually feel
embarrassed by this, I was just trying to understand and articulate someone
else's feelings on this. I'm sorry if the explanation didn't do it for you.

~~~
jxcl
> 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 Latin alphabet is that it has to be able to be written
efficiently as well as read. Your trillions of humans over a few thousand
years have had to both read and write this alphabet. In the past few hundred
years we've had technology that allows someone who made a huge investment to
produce massive amounts of text without writing, and in the past few decades
the ability to produce text without writing has become completely ubiquitous.
Does it still make sense for this alphabet to optimize for hand writing? Are
you arguing that the constraints that made the Latin (or any handwritten)
alphabet have remained unchanged over thousands of years? They want to
redesign an alphabet to fit modern constraints. We consume a lot of text on
devices that need to have screens that fit in our pockets. Perhaps a two-
thousand year old alphabet isn't still the optimal solution?

I also don't think the authors necessarily expect to disrupt anything. They
just made something cool and put it on the internet. I'm happy people like
this exist.

~~~
PyroLagus
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.

------
bcheung
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.

~~~
trogdoro
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.

------
reportingsjr
For people interested in non-latin methods of writing I would suggest checking
out shorthand writing as well as the shavian alphabet.

I find shavian particularly interesting since it is based on phonetic
pronuncation with which I've had many issues and embarrassments!

~~~
calibas
Here's a good site for anyone interested, it covers both shavian and dotsies:

[https://www.omniglot.com/writing/shavian.htm](https://www.omniglot.com/writing/shavian.htm)

[https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/dotsies.htm](https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/dotsies.htm)

------
snek
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.

~~~
trogdoro
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.

------
fsiefken
Ithkuil 2.0 (9 vowels and 29 consonants) could use a similar setup for it's
writing system, but as mentioned by others should make the mapping more
intuitive; using dots just because a,b,c,d,e are the first 5 letters is not.

------
karmakaze
The mapping has not been thought out. If designing a new representation, why
map the single dots from a-e, single dashes f-i, etc. More thought was put
into Morse code, which even used vertically would be better.

[Sad that this tops HN.]

------
0x8BADF00D
This is interesting for a lot of reasons. It’s almost like a compression
scheme for text as opposed to an image. The question is, is it lossless or
lossy? What is the Shannon entropy for this set of symbols?

~~~
StavrosK
It's definitely lossless (it encodes leter-for-letter). However, it has much
higher entropy than the latin alphabet.

~~~
Koshkin
> _higher entropy_

How so? The entropy looks (dangerously) low to me.

~~~
StavrosK
High entropy = very low margin for error.

"aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" is low entropy, "JkjgpUBn74AREExy" is high.

~~~
Koshkin
Well I guess I am more used to the physicist’s definition of entropy, which
can be described as “the higher the entropy, the less we care about the
details.”

~~~
StavrosK
Very possibly, but, as far as I know, in the information-theoretic sense
(which is what we mean when we talk about alphabets and conflating one letter
for another) it's "high entropy" = "low redundancy".

------
c3534l
How is making everything look the same better for reading? I can read UPC
codes more easily that this garbage. This is static. It's compressed like for
computers, not expanded for humans.

------
sammycdubs
I wonder if typography can exist within a writing system like this?

~~~
baroffoos
Just wait for the serif version

------
dmos62
This is so cool.

I'd like to be able to change it for my needs. I'd try making vowels round, so
that I'd have more visual cues.

------
wukerplank
How does this fare with visually impaired people? Or with people 50+ who need
reading glasses?

------
walterbell
This looks like the _message-from-the-future_ font on Travellers.

~~~
Koshkin
(It actually doesn’t, if you look closely.)

------
hek2600
Very cool. I like that text to speech works with this!

------
AnnoyingSwede
This is amazing, standardizing on it now.

------
nuguy
I think we should invent a new language for humanity. Ive tried to design one
a little bit.

There are tons of ways to describe the sounds that a human mouth can make, and
you can find very detailed nomenclature about it but generally it is useful to
think of a spoken language as consisting of a set of phonemes, which are
fundamental sounds. I looked at a list of the most common phonemes and just
decided to use the top 20 in order to make the pronunciation and recognition
of all the sounds of this new language as easy as possible. Between all the
languages of the world, there is considerably more overlap of some sounds than
others, so I believe it’s useful to use the most overlapped ones.

Most languages consist of open phonemes and closed phonemes. Most languages
include words that end on a closed sound like the word “stop.” Notice that
actually saying this word without making an open sound and the closed “p”
sound is impossible. In reality the word sounds like “stop-ah” because of the
physics of the mouth. In this new language, all words start with a closed
sound and end with an open sound, for example “gah” “dah” “dee” “nee” and so
on.

If you take a bunch of common closed sounds and open sounds, and have none
that sound similar to the others in any way (distinctive sounds are necessary
for easy learning and understanding by learners because after a certain age,
discriminating between similar sounding sounds is impossible.) then you have a
list that can create around 40 or 400 “base combinations” of one closed sound
and one open sound, like the examples above. I can’t remeber the exact number
but I have it all written out somewhere. Limiting words to 20 or 30
combinations of these base combinations, you have a word space that is larger
than a human can memorize probably, even after cutting out all the bad
combinations like “dee-dee-dee-dee-dee.” So in the end you have words that
might look like “nah-kah-too-nigh.” You give up compactness compared to
English but gain advantages in other areas. Namely clarity and truer
correlation between how a word is spelled and pronounced which is key for
learning a new language. Also it’s impossible to have something like two words
that sound the same like “two” and “too.”

The language would cross of several base combinations as I mentioned earlier.
These singletons “dee” “dah” “nee” and so on, would not have any meaning. The
next level up, two of these combinations together like “dee-nee” or “too-goo”
would have meanings that are fundamental and common and would act as root
words to form other higher level words just like in English with Latin and
Greek. So for example the root word “dee-soo” means to finish, to terminate,
to end. There is a joke in there by the way. And the root word “vigh-tah”
might mean life, animation or prosperity. So the word “dee-soo-vigh-tah” might
mean death. And so on. I think the root word system is very good in English
and doing it very deliberately in a new language would be good.

Often in English we make up words with other words. Or we start to use two
words, a phrase, as it’s own word. This would be formalized into this new
language with vocal and written markers to insert in between individual words
that when spliced together form a good word for some new thing. This might act
both as a staging tool for new concepts before they are formally introduced
into the dictionary but also a better way of improvising combinations on the
spot to meet strange or funny one-off combinations.

Unlike thai and a few other languages, written words have delimiters (!) and
unlike English, it isn’t an empty space that can easily be interpreted
incorrectly.

The alphabet would consist of very carefully designed letters, each one
representing one of the aforementioned base sounds. Each letter would be
designed so as to be very difficult to write or read in a way that causes it
to be mistaken for another letter. In English we cross our zeros to not
confuse them with The letter O. This language would effectively do that in
advance for all letters.

Still haven’t thought of what conjugation method would be best. Or other
higher level stuff.

------
reaperducer
_About time for an update, no?_

No.

Once again, Silicon Valley "discovers" something that was already invented.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braille](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braille)

~~~
nerdponx
How easy it would be to "read" Braille visually, like Dotsies? I imagine they
are optimized for different uses, no?

~~~
mwcampbell
Sighted braille teachers can read braille visually, even upside down, so they
can read what's coming out of the student's brailler in real time. I had at
least one teacher who could do that.

But of course, that's a specialized skill. To judge for yourself how conducive
braille is to visual reading, when presented as black on white (or the
opposite) instead of raised dots on a page, you can grab a braille font here:

[https://www.hadley.edu/online_course_font.asp](https://www.hadley.edu/online_course_font.asp)

