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Forever font

blog.kenperlin.com

37 pointsbootload15 comments

I don't really see the need to use a pixel font when printing to paper. It's not like a piece of paper has a given grid that must be followed like a monitor (which is not totally true, given sub-pixel anti-aliasing on LCDs).

This might be a dumb question, but why not just take a regular font and shrink it to the same size as the pixel font, and print that, assuming you're not using an old dot-matrix printer? In other words, why limit yourself to those 8 bits?

Most printing technologies still work with dots: dots of ink, dots of toner, dots of wax. You can get greyscale by varying the amount of stuff in a dot, which generally will make the dot bigger or smaller without changing its actual color. You can also get variations by using different colors of ink/toner/wax for different dots, or mixed in the same dot.

For very-long-term archival, these variations are probably too subtle and too likely to be lost over time. A black and white pattern of dots will probably last a lot longer and be easier to interpret than slight variations in size and/or shade of the dots.

The thing I love about the idea of storing data on paper is that we have lots of experience with paper, have a clear understanding of the failure modes, and know how to keep paper around for hundreds of years.

The frustrating thing is that even using high density barcodes, it still takes several banker boxes per gigabyte.

My current thinking surrounding long term data archives is to store data on a durable, high density medium and use paper to keep the instructions for how to decode the data on the high density storage.

A modern laser-printed page has better archival characteristics than the Domesday book.

Most paper is now acid-free. It's chemically stable cellulose that few creatures can eat. Laser toner is black plastic powder, heat-fused to the paper and thus waterproof and fadeproof. It's not fireproof but nothing short of stone or metal is anyway. And it's available in virtually unlimited quantities.

If you wanted to preserve the most important terabyte or two of our civilization's legacy you could do worse than a cargo container full of Xeroxes.

Reminds me of the Long Now Foundation's Rosetta disk: http://www.rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/

I do like the fact that Perlin's idea doesn't require a laser-etched plate and could conceivably be produced on any home printer, although Long Now's device is probably going to last longer.

Alternate title: "If Flash game designers managed records preservation"

This isn't really a new idea. Pixel fonts have been around about as long as graph paper, I suspect.

Here's something similar, for example:

http://www.dafont.com/wendy.font

Why not just use good microfiche. Then it would be waterproof, as well as more compact than any dot printer could achieve.

Good points, but I think it would be a lot easier to keep paper dry than microfiche cool; the former can be done passively, the latter requires active systems for most of the world.

Just dig a big hole. Once you get into the earth a bit, the temperature is a constant coolness. Plus, an old mineshaft is a pretty good candidate for surviving some "end of the world" scenario.

Yeah, but that cuts against the "people being able to find it again" problem.

I did one of those in my Apple II days. Of course, the purpose was not to print it for future generations, but just to cram as much text as possible in as little pixels we had (a stock Apple II had 192 lines of 280 pixels)

It seems to me that some combination of Huffman encoding for Markov chained letter transitions with an error correcting code, combined with instructions for decoding, would make more sense.

Don't forget a 'linefeed' character that indicates where lines join into paragraphs. Something Project Gutenberg forgot with their ASCII texts.

Aren't there places in the world with low levels of education and knowledge and so on right now that we could test some of these ideas of jump starting educated civilisation?

If it works, well we don't regard educating people as a bad thing so that's no qualm. We have controls already - we wouldn't hobble them but carrying on as we do now should be OK.

If the attempts fail for social, governmental, language, etc. reasons that's no excuse - all those things could happen in a real post-apocalyptic future. And if the attempts succeed then they might help avoid said future.

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