Comment by enriquto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by enriquto | Hacker News Reader

None of these covers shows "the" Dune font, for me. The first edition of Dune had a very stylized calligraphy that looked like arabic. I remember it vividly since my dad had this book in the living room, among others; and when I was learning to read, this was the only cover that I couldn't read at all. (It was a translation, but with the same cover.)

These letters are shown on the wikipedia page about the novel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_%28novel%29

EDIT: The covers of some modern french translations are also incredible. Just the four letters D U N E, which are exactly the same shape but rotated 90 degrees. It's an incredibly simple and effective design.

> Just the four letters D U N E, which are exactly the same shape but rotated 90 degrees. It's an incredibly simple and effective design.

For those interested: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/P/B08HPFCMLS.01._SCLZZZZZZ...

See also: Sun Microsystems' logo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sun-Logo.svg

When I went to my first computer fair as a teenager, I saw the Sun Microsystems booth and was blown away by the fantastic logo. As I had never seen a Unix machine before, I didn’t know what to do with the computers on display, though.

The very first Unix I was exposed to was from Sun; I remember seeing the logo on their servers and thinking that those were the most beautiful computers I had seen (which isn't much because I had hardly seen any servers before that). I still remember that one of those came with a key (forgot whether to turn it on or lock the power button panel?)

Didn't Sun computers run Irix? Is Irix Unix?

IRIX was SGI, not Sun (and anyways yes, it's a Unix).

Thanks for clarifying. I always thought these other named systems were Unix-like but not Unix but without going all recursive like GNU with the naming

The history of UNIX is complex...

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix)

Suns ran Solaris, of course.

SunOS was BSD-ish originally, then around 1994 they shifted to a more SVR4 variant and rebranded to Solaris. I think Solaris 2.x was SVR4 and Solaris 1.x was BSD retronaming of what was SunOS named earlier.

It's been a while so I may not have the numbers quite right.

Anyway, there was some overlap in nomenclature, so a version bump of the SunOS naming (and Solaris numbering) implied a shift from BSD-ish to SVR4-ish, as I recall.

(And I worked for Sun for a while after that, and used Suns a ton around the shift)

"SunOS is the kernel, Solaris is the distribution as a whole" was how I was always told it went. Solaris 1.x used a SunOS 4.x kernel, Solaris 2.x and upwards used SunOS 5.x. Version synchronicity was achieved by jumping from Solaris 2.6/SunOS 5.6 to Solaris 7.x/SunOS 5.7 in 1998 when UltraSPARC support was introduced. Of course Solaris 11.x/SunOS 5.11 was the last version.

Gosh I've seen that so many times before and yet never really looked at it until now.

Ah, as if raked into the sand. Brilliant.

Some Unicode variants:

ᑐ ᑌ ᑎ ᑕ

ᑐ ᑌ ᑎ ᕮ

⊃ ∪ ∩ ⊂

Edit to add one more...

⋻ ⋃ ⋂ ⋳

I imagine most people are aware but the second variant you have there is essentially what was used for the most recent movie: http://www.impawards.com/2021/posters/dune_ver16_xlg.jpg

There were a lot of "DUNC" jokes about the poster, like that the main character was named "Dunc". (Real Dune heads may have some "well, actually" thoughts about that.)

I reckon Dune fans find all sorts of deeper meaning in the hit B-52s song "Private Idaho".

OMG the DUNC joke predates the new movie.

> Just the four letters D U N E, which are exactly the same shape but rotated 90 degrees.

This is what they went with for the movie posters too: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8e/Dune_%282021_... ...although, they cheated a bit with the E.

EDIT: Here is a better resolution: https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/2sxSn0jjjQoIIZfZjC6j5GZk... :)

It reminds me a bit of a visit to the optician :)

DUNC :D:D

They went for the right decision there, I wouldn't call it cheating. It's a nice to incorporate the importance/uniqueness of that planet in the dune world. They could've just went for a horizontal line/pipe and noone wouldve cared.

> EDIT: The covers of some modern french translations are also incredible. Just the four letters D U N E, which are exactly the same shape but rotated 90 degrees. It's an incredibly simple and effective design.

Indeed, the Robert Laffont 2020 edition looks great: https://www.noosfere.org/livres/EditionsLivre.asp?numitem=13...

Yes the metal cover with forms changing with the light are great, look almost like holograms, extremely SciFi! The static pictures can't make them justice.

I was wondering where I got that copy. My old one had its binding failed and I purchased this Robert Laffont special edition (an email promo maybe?). Thanks for pointing it out for me.

I liked the original cover because it is the only one with a truly alien landscape. Once the movies started being discussed, Dune became and an earth desert with earth-like sandstone rocks. Look at the rocks in the original cover. They were different enough to clearly not be from earth geology.

That's not arabic, rather just cursive.

Many children have grown up these days without learning cursive in school, thus every time they see squiggly fonts they think Arabic first.

Given the Arakkis language is based on Arabic, I would not be surprised that the typographic design of Dune fonts is supposed to evoke a feeling of Arabic

My grandmother noticed graffiti tags, which are very ornate generally, and concluded that they were written in arabic.

> Many children have grown up these days without learning cursive in school, thus every time they see squiggly fonts they think Arabic first.

Wait, are you saying that children in US schools write in block letters these days? That must be slow!

Contrary to what olduns would have us believe, cursive is NOT [fundamentally] faster than printing. Rather, the people who have trouble 'printing' quickly seem to be those who rarely 'print' their letters.

Also interesting to me that, among people who use cursive, both difficulty producing legible cursive and complaining about being unable to read somebody's cursive (sometimes their own) seems more common.

> Contrary to what olduns would have us believe, cursive is NOT [fundamentally] faster than printing.

Do you have links to back that up? Due to my illegible cursive I often fill all kinds of forms in block letters and definitely _feel_ that it is much slower.

I'd start by saying that illegible writing should be a disqualifier for comparison of speed. Slow down until it's legible!

Some factors affecting which writing method is fastest for you, (while remaining legible to others and your later self, include which one you use the most, and drippiness of the ink. Runny ink (or paint!) can be more prone to blotches, soak-through, and other blemishes, especially when printing, lending itself better to constant movement and cursive.

You may find that a hybrid of semi-joined and unjoined lettering fastest. I do not recommend shorthand if someone else will have to read it; shorthand is notoriously variant between practioners.

Anecdata from people I've talked to or my own experience about writing faster than cursive users in our cohorts won't help anybody much. Nor will my discovery that straight-stroke runes allowed me to keep up when taking notes from a particularly fast-talking history teacher. So, about the request for links… (-:

The link I reached for returned 404, and isn't in Archive.org (one truncated PDF file, which won't open), so I went digging. Wellll… raking, more like. Mostly, I found articles and posts claiming either "cursive is faster" or "no conclusive evidence for any claimed benefits of cursive". Consequently, I turned to:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=cursive

Of the 7 relevant-seeming papers I've read so far, and another 4 grepped, I'm seeing (1) tiny cohorts with either no significant speed difference or small improvement with cursive, (2) usually turned out to be testing the wrong thing (like how fast a cohort's speed with one method improved, without comparison to any other method; or whether teaching one or another method affected the subjects' ability to read in general), (3) sometimes no attempt to account for legibility.

For me, all the extra loops and curves seem to conspire to make me fit less writing in the same space and use more ink/pencil/whatever.

I'm old enough to have mainly used cursive in school and I definitely had the thought that it seemed like a vaguely arabic-inspired cursive when I saw it the flourishes on the D.

The flourishes in the D of that cover are exactly how I was taught to write the uppercase D in cursive at school. I remember (as a kid) thinking it was odd that to write a `D` one had to start by writing an `I`, but never questioned it.

But from looking at examples of cursive on google images, it seems like that form is no longer as prominent.

The flourishes in the D of that cover are exactly how I was taught to write the uppercase D in cursive at school.

We've now established that you went to school in Arab, and this is why you wrote D in Arabic, for at no point did you counter this logic.

(I am using chatgpt reasoning here)

I disagree.

The wide gamut in line thickness and the orientation of it is typical for Arabic fonts, but not for cursive ones.

Personally, this kind of line reminds me of a arab dagger even.

The variations in line thickness are exactly what you’d get with a calligraphy pen (and pens before ball points like fountain pens, quills) and are a function of the consistent direction of the pen and the smoothly varying direction the line is being written. So you will see it in all old pen/quill writing styles.

No, not like this. You'd get a different kind of variation in line thickness. That was the main point of my comment, but apparently I didn't explain it well.

But quite clearly designed to draw a connection to the Bedouin-inspired Fremen, and general North African-like setting.

Thanks for pointing that out, as I had almost forgotten about that first edition.

I was trying to remember where I had heard of Chilton, the publisher of the first edition, and realized it was automotive manuals!

The story of that first edition is interesting and somewhat sad, although maybe edifying and not alone in publishing and other forms of narrative arts.

I remember reading that, because the editor was as you said better know for its technical manuals, a friend of Herbert joked that maybe they thought to publish an Ornithopter maintenance guide.

That makes sense given Herbert borrowed heavily from Middle Eastern, Islamic mythology

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