Ask HN: How do you feel about shorthand?

The age of moleskine mania has thankfully mostly left us by now; only a couple years ago it seemed like the whole internet had agreed that one simply could not get any work done unless one had a Fisher Space Pen and one of several very specific notebooks at hand at all times. Nevertheless it seems that some people still do find it useful to keep a notebook with them, and are generally still interested in the process of writing things down—even while the majority seems to think that writing by hand is a skill as worthy of personal development as, say, horse-buggy skills.

For several years now I've been developing my own system of shorthand. It started as, simply, my own system of letter shapes, because I had terrible handwriting—I just devised a single, consistent, attractive character set for myself and then trained myself to use it exclusively and always, so that my handwriting was more attractive and even.

But as these things go—informed by a personal interest in historical text systems—I started to include extra-alphabetical characters into the mix. First an ampersand, then a couple special double characters, a dollar sign; quickly I moved on to ligatures—some pre-existing in the Roman alphabet, but some of my own creation. And then characters for common words, prefixes, suffixes. I started using superscripts and subscripts and drawing inspiration from historical scripts like old Anglo Saxon writing, Tironian Notes, the Abbreviationes of the Middle Ages, et cetera. And so now I've got a relatively sophisticated system with several hundred different characters in it, and a whole set of rules of composition.

Partly this is an exercise in efficiency—my writing is much shorter and faster than plain English—but it's also an aesthetic undertaking. I do derive a lot of artistic pleasure from it, from the system of it, and from the look of it on the page.

So my question is: does anybody care about this? Of all the people I've told about it, many of them thought it looked awesome when I showed it to them, but only one person ever expressed any interest in learning it for himself, and so I don't even know how learnable it is. I wonder if there's some geeky demographic out there on the web who would find value in my documenting the whole thing, writing a couple explanatory essays, scanning all the characters, etc., et cetera. If there isn't, by the way, that's ok. Like I said, I am quite proud of it for its own sake and it's fun to trot out at geeky parties. But if I thought that I'd get any kind of response from the web at large, I'd think hard about putting in the (non-trivial) effort to really document the whole thing and try to make it as learnable as possible.