Boustrophedon

A related technique, aiming to solve the same problem, is the BeeLine method for displaying text with line-wrapping color gradients. [1] Unlike with Boustrophedon, the return sweep (visual motion from right to left) is not eliminated, but it is assisted by colored text that flagposts where the next line is.

Disclosure: I came up with the BeeLine method, which was first popularized on Hacker News. [2]

1: http://www.beelinereader.com

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784

I first encountered this word in troff documentation back in the 1980s. Two examples:

A Typesetter-independent TROFF by Brian W. Kernighan, 1982. https://www.hack.org/mc/texts/ditroff-kernighan.ps.gz

Using nroff and troff on the Sun Workstation, 1986. http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/sun/sunos/3.0/800-1321-03A_Usin...

I recently did a graphics experiment with volume rendering where I wanted to partition a grid into groups of active voxels. Imagining a Morton or Hilbert curve would be best, I compared it to row-major/scanline order and Boutrophedonic, as maybe a couple different baselines. I was very surprised to find that Boustrophedonic was the best of these in terms of minimizing volume and overlap of the groups. I was packing naively and not being careful to use powers of two, which definitely compromised the usage of Morton and Hilbert, so my result isn’t necessarily the best or generally applicable, but it was still surprising and interesting to me and some others people I discussed with, that doing it the dumb way lead to back-and-forth ordering being better than space filling curves with what seem to be more apparent locality properties. (Well, it wasn’t as surprising to the guy who suggested I should try a Boustrophedonic ordering. Maybe he experienced the same surprise earlier.)

Chemists still write in this way when writing mechanisms. Here's a typical example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_mechanism#/media/File...

Related:

Boustrophedon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15539373 - Oct 2017 (59 comments)

Boustrophedon Order - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1547209 - July 2010 (12 comments)

Many dot matrix printers were boustrophedonic.

Also how I mow my lawn.

I find rongorongo a lot easier to read [1]. I wish kindle would support that layout mode, I could easily double my reading speed.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo

See also ambigram, coined by Douglas Hofstadter, which is a word or phrase that also makes sense after a transformation, commonly a point rotation of 180°:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambigram

Word ambigrams make fun logos.

My Latin teacher would sometimes describe words like this. In this case he said if a person were writing a long sentence along a mountainside, rather than walk all the way back to begin a new line they'd do this.

I have always wanted a list of these interesting words that relate to grammar or linguistics. I can ask GPT for some, like "epenthesis" and "apocope" and "epanalepsis," but here's hoping someone will point me to a compendium.

Philo Farnsworth, an early television Pioneer, drew from this idea.

> A farm boy, his inspiration for scanning an image as a series of lines came from the back-and-forth motion used to plow a field.[1]

[1] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Philo_Farnsworth

This makes me disappointed that english letters aren't all horizontally symmetric so you'd just be alternating the order of the letters within words line to line, but still writing/reading the same letter forms.

Is there an established horizontally symmetric english alphabet derivative people use for creative purposes?

I would guess that most written languages started out this way (not enough space for my line? Impossible!), before people realized it didn't scale well for larger documents

First came across this word in Godel, Escher, Bach.