Optimizing Handwriting | Hacker News Reader

Optimizing Handwriting

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7 pointsevilsimon16 comments

I write e with one stroke. I am very confused by this article.

In fact, I use one stroke for all lowercase letters except f, i, j, k, t, x, and z.

Going by the diagram, it looks as if substantial changes in direction are being counted as a new stroke (which is arguable). Look at `r' - I somehow doubt the pen is lifted between drawing one part and the next.

This is correct. I chose this definition of "stroke" for simplicity. It's meant as a proxy measure for "difficulty of writing the letter". A better measure might be "median time it takes to write each letter at an acceptable level of legibility", but that would require a lot more effort. The numerical results will depend on the measure of effort, but I suspect the general point will be the same.

When I was in school I learned writing longhand as a default. Not block letters. This way most letters are composed of one stoke.

So for me, as a German, this article did not make the slightest sense at first. And even having mostly switched to a kind of block letter style, I write most letters with one and max. two strokes.

I could never imagine writing a "w" with 4 strokes.

For me, this will always be one stroke. Four wold be like stoping my car engine at every direction change. Then getting out of the car. Reentry, engine start, change direction. Start driving. And so on.

(Agreed.)

...how do you write a 'z' if that's not one stroke?

Also, I was taught (poorly) to write 'f' as a single stroke. The best picture I can find is here, in the centre of the image:

https://twinkl.co.uk/image/resource_preview_xlarge/T-L-635A-...

I put lines through my zs and 7s. It's uncommon I guess.

Well it wasn't really anything more than a exploration into handwriting and there is a ton of stuff out on the Internet concerning handwriting and there wasn't any mention any other research or tools. It was more of a shower thought written on medium.

Well it wasn't really anything more than a exploration into handwriting and there is a ton of stuff out on the Internet concerning this and there wasn't any mention. It was more of a shower thought written on paper.

hm, in elementary I got taught to write every word in one stroke, except for the uppercase F's and T's and the like. Consequently I found the article to be utterly confusing.

I also have some qualms with how you decide what is a "stroke", but this is an interesting line of analysis.

However, I would argue it is more important for an alphabet to optimized for readability rather than writability. If you want to write fast, learn shorthand or the stenotype!

Admittedly, the choice of "stroke" definition is an imperfect measure of the cost to write each letter (see my comment above).

Even if you want readability to weigh more heavily than writability into the optimization, wouldn't you agree that increasing writability, at no cost to readability, would be good (it's a "Pareto improvement")? This is the point of the concluding section, which discusses swapping the meaning of existing letters.

Yeah. The most common letters should prioritize clarity not ease of handwriting. As such the symbol for e seems like a pretty good choice.

If we are going to do radical alphabet redesigns, I suggest coming up with new designs for each of the 26 letters so that it only takes one stroke to write each. That would probably result in an alphabet that would be more difficult to read, but it would be optimized for the number-of-strokes-for-average-english-writing heuristic.

You might be interested to read about Elian:

http://www.ccelian.com/ElianScriptFull.html

I think the letter notation could use optimisation --- the cost per letter varies extensively, but the letters are assigned alphabetically, so letters near the top of the alphabet are cheaper to write than letters at the bottom --- but I like the underlying principle that it's designed for humans to write, not machines, therefore it's intended from the ground up to allow expression and choice in how you write it.

#1 our zeros have a line striking through them

#2 the ones have a tick on the top at all times

Here's a great optimization: write in cursive! So much time is wasted writing every letter separately. If it's still too slow, there's always shorthand.

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