
Boustrophedon - breck
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon
======
bqe
Fun story about this: in college we had to make a barcode reader out of a
simple phototransistor. To scan the barcode, you had to slide the device along
a piece of paper. The barcode scanner had to be isolated from ambient light so
that we'd get a good reading.

However, our project was to read a lot of information via the barcode (a
paragraph of English text encoded as Code 39 or similar, can't remember the
exact details), so it wouldn't fit on one line of paper. Lots of teams decided
to implement complex heuristics to determine when to ignore readings when
lifting the barcode reader off of the page and to scan the next line.

But we decided to use boustrophedon to generate the page with the barcodes on
it so that we never had to lift the barcode scanner off of the page. You just
had to scan left to right, then down one line, and then right to left.

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DonHopkins
Scott Kim has a wonderful talent at designing "ambigrams". Check out his
classic book "Inversions" and his gallery of more recent work!

[http://www.scottkim.com.previewc40.carrierzone.com/inversion...](http://www.scottkim.com.previewc40.carrierzone.com/inversions/)

An inversion is a word or name written so it reads in more than one way. For
instance, the word Inversions above is my name upside down. Douglas Hofstadter
coined ambigram as the generic word for inversions. I drew my first inversion
in 1975 in an art class, wrote a book called Inversions in 1981, and am now
doing animated inversions.

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kjhughes
I can see an advantage to having the beginning of the next line immediately
beneath the end of the previous line -- it avoids a greater refocus adjustment
distance to start new lines. This would greatly reduce mistakes where the nth
or (n+2)th line is started by mistake instead of the (n+1)th.

However, I don't immediately see an advantage to flipping the letters across
the vertical axis for each new line.

~~~
morsch
I found it surprisingly easy to read the mirrored examples in the article. I
think it may be more comfortable -- after a while, at least -- to read the
mirrored letters; because we don't read letter-by-letter anyway and the "word
image" is intact (just mirrored).

Here's the example image (with mirrored letters):
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon#/media/File:Bous...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon#/media/File:Boustrophedon.png)

And here's a non-mirrored version:

    
    
      THIS EXAMPLE OF BOUSTROPHEDON TEXT WAS
      AIDEPIKIW EHT ROF YLLACIFICEPS NETTIRW
      ARTICLE  ON  THIS OX TURNING METHOD OF
      TNEICNA  NI TXET HTIW LLAW A GNIREVOC
      GREECE AND ELSEWHERE

~~~
kjhughes
You raise a good point in that we don't read letter-by-letter anyway. So, this
variant, which leverages recognition of whole words at a time, would have the
line tracking advantage of Boustrophedon without the problem of duplicating
letters for forward and reverse directions:

    
    
      THIS EXAMPLE OF BOUSTROPHEDON TEXT WAS
      WIKIPEDIA THE FOR SPECIFICALLY WRITTEN
      ARTICLE  ON  THIS OX TURNING METHOD OF
      ANCIENT  IN TEXT WITH WALL A COVERING
      GREECE AND ELSEWHERE

~~~
Legogris
Problem here is that if you enter mid-page it's not necessarily obvious which
direction to read.

~~~
twobyfour
But you can figure it out trivially easily based on which way the letters are
flipped.

------
vec
With enough practice, I could see this being much easier to read. There's no
jumping from the end of one line and searching for the next, plus each line is
visually distinct from the ones immediately above and below.

I wonder how much text I would have to read like this before it felt natural?

~~~
gumby
> I wonder how much text I would have to read like this before it felt
> natural?

If you see my note above I mention that it wasn't a big deal. More to your
question, frankly learning ancient Greek grammar was far more painful -- the
effort to learn to parse old inscriptions was in the noise compared to the
effort to understand what the hell they were writing.

------
cattleprodigy
[http://boustro.com/app](http://boustro.com/app)

~~~
chaosmachine
It's surprisingly difficult to stop my eyes from snapping back to the left
side after each line.

~~~
482794793792894
I also find that my brain wrongly pattern-matches words that form a different
word when reading the letters in reverse.

So, I for example often misread "was" as "saw" or "on" as "no".

------
mkohler
I first encountered the word in the excellent book, Expert C Programming, by
Peter van der Linden, who explained that declarations in C are read
boustrophedonically.

~~~
morsch
In C++, on the other hand, they're read stroustruphedonically.

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pavel_lishin
What was the reason for writing this way on stone? It can't be to keep text
aligned - you can just walk to the left and keep going, and the text will stay
aligned just as well as if you'd been writing right-to-left.

~~~
gumby
What is the reason for writing always in the same direction?

I don't ask this as a joke: is there seriously a cognitive advantage to having
to pass your eye all the way back to the beginning of the next line (whether
you read right-left, left-right or top-bottom) vs immediately dropping down
and continue reading?

On the other hand I spent a lot of time in high school and university reading
pictures of boustrophedon greek texts and once you are used to it you don't
even think of it. Likewise R-L texts -- my difficulty with handwritten arabic
is the wide variation in characters; the directionality rapidly became
automatic, even in mixed-language texts.

In the case of boustrophedon texts, a dominating factor is the sheer
irregularity of character shapes (nothing was machine made) and worse, a lot
of the black and white photos in books are old, crummy ones which make the
deciphering even more "interesting". And this was all before the development
of spaces between the words too, and at a time when character shapes were
evolving.

Regardless, all written languages I know of (even counting Korean, which is
slightly different in-word), seem to have picked a single direction as a
dominant, and even before the development of mechanised writing (which would
make the characters extremely regular, which might drive a tend to optimize).
So there could be some cognitive benefit. I could imagine there's an advantage
in that you could train a NN in your visual system to recognize regularly-
shaped characters and do look-ahead, but I have seen no studies of it.

~~~
aaroninsf
Double the characters to recognize; double the heuristics to internalize for
rapid reading.

No idea what the relative cost of those are but I'd wager it exceeds the
mechanical cost of scanning back to the "front" of the line...

~~~
Grustaf
A mirrored letter still looks very similar. Most people learn the letter
topologies first, and only later pin down the chirality. Just think of all the
mirrored N's you probably used to write!

So it's definitely not twice as much work, I'd say it's not more work at all,
you basically just don't worry about the chirality and that's it.

------
wakamoleguy
Here's a tangentially related article about a crossword-solving program called
Dr. Fill, which got tripped up by boustrophedon in its debut at the American
Crossword Puzzle Tournament in 2012.

[http://www.crosswordtournament.com/articles/iw032212.htm](http://www.crosswordtournament.com/articles/iw032212.htm)

------
optimate
My son would write like this when he was first learning to write. I was
constantly having to prompt him to carriage return, and write the letters the
correct way round.

------
blt
See also: the Boustrophedon cellular decomposition for robotic 2D coverage
path planning, e.g. for mowing, painting, vacuuming, etc. The method works by
decomposing an arbitrary environment into a union of smaller, simplified
shapes that are easy to cover with a boustrophedon motion - moving back and
forth like an ox plowing.

[http://planning.cs.uiuc.edu/node352.html](http://planning.cs.uiuc.edu/node352.html)

------
psykotic
Older NVIDIA GPUs (and maybe current ones) used an alternating-direction
scheme for coarse rasterization which was called (somewhat tongue in cheek)
boustrophedonic rasterization. The idea was to have more spatial locality for
the coverage samples issued by the rasterizer compared to a conventional same-
direction scheme. Spatial locality in the two-dimensional sense correlates to
spatial locality in the texture cache, for example.

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jaclaz
More or less the ancient Greeks - in their simplicity - chose to use ASCII 10
(newline/line feed) instead of 13+10 (carriage return+line feed). ;-)

[https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-great-newline-
schism/](https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-great-newline-schism/)

~~~
maaark
>Even if you rule out unicode and stick to old-school ASCII, like most
Facebook relationships â€¦ it's complicated.

Brilliant, encoding problems in an article about encoding!

------
DonHopkins
The Floyd Steinberg error diffusion dithering algorithm can use a
boustrophedonous scan order to eliminate the diagonal geometric artifacts you
get by scanning each row the same direction.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floyd%E2%80%93Steinberg_dither...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floyd%E2%80%93Steinberg_dithering)

"In some implementations, the horizontal direction of scan alternates between
lines; this is called "serpentine scanning" or boustrophedon transform
dithering."

I implemented some eight bit cellular automata heat diffusion rules with error
diffusion, which accumulated an unfortunate drift up and to the right because
of the scan order.

Rudy Rucker pointed out the problem:

[http://donhopkins.com/mediawiki/index.php/CAM6_Simulator](http://donhopkins.com/mediawiki/index.php/CAM6_Simulator)

"Rudy Rucker: I feel like you might have some kind of bug in your update code,
an off-by-one thing or a problem with the buffer flipping. My reason is that I
see persistent upward drift in the action, like if I mouse drag a blob it
generally moves up. Also the patterns appearing in the blob aren't uniform. I
mean...this IS supposed to be the 2D Rug rule, isn't it?"

So instead of scanning back and forth boustrophedoniously (which wouldn't
eliminate the vertical drift, just the horizontal drift), I rotated the
direction of scanning 90 degrees each frame ("spinning scan") to spread the
drift out evenly in all directions over time.

[https://github.com/SimHacker/CAM6/blob/master/javascript/CAM...](https://github.com/SimHacker/CAM6/blob/master/javascript/CAM6.js#L4423)

    
    
        // Rotate the direction of scanning 90 degrees every step,
        // to cancel out the dithering artifacts that would cause the
        // heat to drift up and to the right.
    

That totally canceled out the unwanted drifting and geometric dithering
artifacts! That made it possible to cultivate much more subtle (or not-so-
subtle) effects, like dynamically switching per-cell between different
anisotropic convolution kernels (see the "Twistier Marble" rule for an extreme
example).

[http://donhopkins.com/home/CAM6](http://donhopkins.com/home/CAM6)

------
icanhackit
And down the Wikipedia rabbit hole...

IBM 1360 Photo-Digital Storage System:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1360](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1360)

------
jagger27
My Latin 101 prof used to go through the rows of seats in boustrophedon order,
his words, to read passages from Wheelock. Don't miss that class very much.

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YeGoblynQueenne
>> boustrophedonically

Such a pitty I don't play Scrabble...

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khedoros1
I used to write some of my college notes this way, when I was trying to make
myself thing more about what I was writing.

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boustrophedon
I use this as my handle online in a few places (github, irc). Hi!

~~~
WorkLifeBalance
My first reaction to seeing this headline was recognizing it as a username. I
thought that was here but given you are newly registered it must have been the
place with the ducks.

~~~
boustrophedon
I am not familiar with "the place with the ducks" as far as I know, so you
probably have the wrong person.

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d--b
that could have been useful to read text on a glass wall from both sides...
too bad that they had not invented it yet.

------
thriftwy
I was sure it will be a very illegal substance by that name.

