Dotsies: Font using dots instead of letters - Optimized for reading, not writing
dotsies.org
dotsies.org
Efficiency: letter frequency is not taken into account. Internationalization: no capital letter/lowercase distinction. No final letter forms. No circumflexes, accents, gravures, hats, dots, umlauts... punctuation is not specified. Physiology: no attempt to take into account how human eyes work.
If this were going to work, Braille would be a lot more popular among sighted folk.
False.
> no capital letter/lowercase distinction
False.
> No circumflexes, accents, gravures, hats, dots, umlauts...
True, but not impossible to overcome though if you'd use your imagination.
Using a pattern was done to make it easier to learn, but many options (with patters and without) were tried out and rejected. Notice that the vowels all have dots at the top row or bottom, which is desirable as it tends to give words hollow shapes with negative space in them.
Optimizing for space efficiency has many dimensions, too dense is not good, and too sparse is not good. There were a couple versions where the frequent letters had fewer dots and were concentrated toward the bottom, but that increased possible ambiguity between words one might mistake for being shifted up or down one dot.
That all not considering the lack of baseline etc. Also, why is "z" the only letter with a 2-dot-width?
I came up with this line last year: "I took a polish to the Polish readings in Reading by the nice guy from Nice." I still haven't found a word which describes two words which are spelled the same except for capitalization and which sound different.
Considering the progression of pattern through the A-Z alphabet, it's extraordinarily unlikely this has anything to do with letter frequency. It's instead quite clear that if the alphabet happened to be recited in a different order, these dots would have the same progression but assigned to different letters.
Have a look at the research behind the "fitaly" stylus keyboard for what goes into "taking letter frequency into account".
> quite clear that if the alphabet happened to be recited in a different order, these dots would have the same progression but assigned to different letters
That is very far from clear. If you'd think for a moment, you'd probably be able to come up with about 10 patterns that could have been used, that appear about as deliberate. As mentioned below, mappings with and without patterns (many more without) were considered.
If you think you've identified a better pattern, post it here. I'd be interested in seeing it.
http://esploded.s3.amazonaws.com/anon_data/2012/eyS/-dotsie2...
Vowels touch the top and bottom of the line, visually outlining the word and providing a sense of center (vowels also use the most dots, where consonants are sparse)
More common consonants use smaller (sparse) dot patterns getting denser as you get into less common (frequent) letters
More common consonants frame the center dot (to contrast the vowels which touch the edges/outside dots) using the less centered patterns as frequency decreases
All the glyphs fit into the 1x5 grid (the letter "Z" was 2 columns wide in the original)
Also worth noting: where possible I tried to make the glyphs memorable ("i" is the best example, followed by "o" and "z")
In retrospect, it may be a good idea to swap the glyphs of my current "B" for the "Y" since y is a semi-vowel it would touch both edges, where "B" has no reason to.
EDIT: here is a second attempt where ONLY vowels touch both edges, and Y is swapped (and touches both edges as a semi-vowel)
http://esploded.s3.amazonaws.com/anon_data/2012/e5YO-dotsie3...
Thoughts?
Not bad!
> More common consonants use smaller (sparse) dot patterns getting denser as you get into less common (frequent) letters
A few mappings emphasizing fewer dots for frequent letters (making for "sparser" words) were tried out and moved away from. The more speckled-looking words tend less to form concrete shapes and create "blocks" that stand out to the eye. If words are too dense you get similar issues, only in the negative. The optimum seems to be on the sparse side, but not overly sparse.
> Also worth noting: where possible I tried to make the glyphs memorable ("i" is the best example, followed by "o" and "z")
The original dotsies O and I are relatively memorable.
> More common consonants frame the center dot (to contrast the vowels which touch the edges/outside dots)
I could see how that could be interesting. How that would balance against the trade-off of ambiguity between similar letters (like s and t) would probably be hard to tell before one tried it.
I wonder if it would be worth coding up a page that lets people make their own mapping and preview them on some text, and posting it to HN.
Regardless of OP's protestations, the diagonal one dots, two dots, etc., have nothing to do with legibility and everything to do with alphabetic order mirrored in dot order.
Your system has both reason and rhyme.
00001 00010 00100 01000 10000 ... 10000 01000 11000 00100 10100 ... 00001 00010 00011 00100 00101 ... 10000 11000 11100 11110 11111 ... 01111 10111 11011 11101 11110 ... 10000 11000 01000 01100 00100 ... etc.
Now, why is it implausible that one or two of the many possible mappings with a pattern has tradeoffs about as good as the best of the many possible mappings without a pattern? Especially when the former have the pretty significant advantage out of the gate that the pattern makes them easier to remember.
Note that a valid critique of the many possibly mappings without patterns compared to the many possible mappings with patterns is that they are harder to learn.
If you put a lot of weight on the dots visually correlating to the numbers, see A, C, F, G, H, I, K, L, O, P, R, S, V, and X - all have a decent correlation.
BS. You don't read in alphabetical order. Just because you can reproduce the dot pattern doesn't mean you've "learned" it for its purpose. That the letter e comes between d and f is not relevant to trying to read.
Or, of course, they could just go through the pattern in their mind until they get to that letter, then they'd have it.
2^5 for a, times 2^5 - 1 for b, etc.
https://gist.github.com/1855582
tl;dr:
DOTSIES
Average density: 2.02
Vowel density: 1.52
Consonant density: 2.33
Average density: 2.78
Vowel density: 4.12
Consonant density: 1.96The current pattern doesn't suggest weighing of anything. You marched the dots down diagonally, first sets of one, then two, and so on. You mirrored alphabetical order with numerical dot order. You're now trying to justify that after the fact. It's not credible.
It's too bad you're choosing to argue instead of seriously considering the surprisingly thoughtful feedback several others have given you here.
For example, my point about FITALY was obviously not about the stylus movement. The similar dynamic isn't movement distance, the similar dynamic would be a statistical use of the legibility of adjacent dot columns. My point was the research that went into Fitaly:
"These figures are obtained using a corpus of digraph probabilities similar to that described by Soukoreff and MacKenzie (1995)... We have measured the frequency of letter-to-letter transitions for a representative corpus of the English language with several millions of characters. For example, this produces the number of times the letter o is followed by the letter a."
Given a dot matrix, there are a limited number of dot patterns. It's straightforward to measure the legibility of those dot patterns to humans of normal visual acuity (using mechanical turk for example), then to mathematically derive a letter assignment that maximizes legibility across, say, the Brown Corpus.
That would be something interesting to see.
I can't just drop the tilde in both cases because then it doesn't make sense. The best I can come up with is (transliterated) "Dona Ana New Mexico where the first n has a tilde over it is one of the few US place names with a tilde in its official name."
That's cumbersome.
Without punctuation, how do you express "eats shoots and leaves" as being different from "eats, shoots and leaves"; that being the punchline to the joke ending "Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves." (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_%26_Leaves )
Also, the bookmarklet seems to skip over paragraphs that have a character they can't represent. I tried it on your post and the paragraph with the 'ñ's wasn't altered.
> the bookmarklet seems to skip over paragraphs that have a character they can't represent
It's not that sophisticated. That's just due to the site's css specifying a font for some paragraphs and not others. Not sure the best way to get it to over-ride everything. I suppose it could be updated to crawl through the dom and append style attributes to all tags.
Re accents etc., currently they just show as normal letters (including the accents), which really isn't that bad. Ways to improve the situation could include squeezing some of the accents in by making their slant more vertical. Re ñ and ü, they could maybe be rotated 90 degrees, or maybe put beside the letters rather than on top of them. If there's a demand for this, it wouldn't take me long to throw a couple straw-man versions of the font out there.
It's implemented as a special font. That means I can put an ñ in the text and see the combination of dotsies and 'normal' text.
I needed to increase the font so I could distinguish the ":" and make out the doties. Even with the font enlargement, it was smaller than the original text. OTOH, I could reduce the normal text by a few font sizes, so the right comparison would require getting practice with both styles and figuring out what font size feels natural, and then make the comparison.
It doesn't seem worthwhile to do that.
What do you mean by "proportional shortcomings"? If it's a comment about varying letter widths, that's a straw man, because humans don't read letter by letter but rather word by word.
Then using a font where letters are, say, half an inch wide would be even better, eh?
> What do you mean by "proportional shortcomings"?
The ratio of the height to width is about the same proportion as a roman letter, resulting in letters and sentences that are very long and narrow, requiring a lot of movement from your eyes. Think using a telescope to examine a long garden hose vs a short fire hose. The visual field of the telescope is analogous to the sweet spot of your retina.
> humans don't read letter by letter but rather word by word.
You've hit on the strong-point of dotsies. Look a paragraph of dotsies text, and you'll see that in the words the letters appear to form contiguous shapes.
There are no ascenders or descenders in a traditional sense, no contours or apertures, and there is no stroke contrast. Also, the baseline is thrown off in many words. Put this all together, and you have text that's miserable to read.
This isn't even to mention the difficulty of getting readers to abandon tradition.
In all, I'd consider this an interesting experiment, but a practical failure.
The important part is that the words are not difficult to distinguish.
> Put this all together, and you have text that's miserable to read.
Interesting how you can come to that conclusion in a few minutes. It would be tempting to write off Kanji if you encountered it for the first time, no? Give it a try before you shoot it down out of hand.
Try telling apart "be" and "ad", with no nearby words. They are identical, because you don't know where the baseline is.
I might be able to use it, but I still feel that I would need space between characters otherwise there is a risk of error, without needing to slow down and make sure things are aligned properly. Also the examples make it apparent that the font size would have to be nearly doubled for accuracy purposes.
If you want to fit more information into a smaller space a script without a 1:1 relation to Latin alphabet might be better. It's almost like being asked to learn another language, and there are already other languages with higher information density in their character symbols.
Many things must be taken into account beyond just where the dots seem like they should go on the letters. However, there's a decent enough correlation on enough of the letters that I suggest it would be pretty easy for you to remember them. For example, A, C, F, H, I, K, O, P, R, S.
Teletypes switched to printing actual letters as soon as they could, even though there were people very highly trained in reading the dots and dashes.
Which is the main strong-point of dotsies. Words are more chunked together, and appear as recognizable shapes.
> and making letters into clouds of disconnected dots
They're not disconnected. That can be easily seen by a cursory glance at dotsies.org.
On the other hand, if you're on some kind of a business-school inhibition-reduction assignment (you know, like "get up in public and say the stupidest thing you can think of"), then you're doing well.
You may be looking at the table of letters, which is just for illustration, where the letters aren't connected. But if you look at the examples you'll see they are very much connected, and appear to form shapes.
Convert each letter into the trinary representation of its 0-based ordinal position – 26 is conveniently close to 3^3, isn't it? Use each digit as a scaled R/G/B value.
So for example, 'a' is letter 0, trinary 000, HTML color #000. 'g' is letter 6, trinary 020, HTML color #0F0. And so forth.
Every one of Dotsie's dots can now be a whole letter! I can fit the full text of 'Huckleberry Finn', 'Pride and Prejudice', and 'The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' on my 1920x1200 monitor – and still have room for the 'Kama Sutra'! (Free Gutenberg Project plain-text editions, of course.) Yes, it may require a jeweler's monocle to read, but think of the space optimization.
The color-blind can join the blind in relying on braille.
" The latin alphabet (abc...) was created thousands of years ago, and is optimized for writing, not reading. "
People used chisel's here and there, but that has little bearing.
Absolutely. There could be several improvements in that way. Maybe along the lines of turning a square of 4 dots into a circle, a line of diagonal dots into a smooth line, etc. Some words can be drawn out pretty simply with a pen, as if the line were passing through the positions of where the dots would be. This is even more pie-in-the-sky than using it as a font but is fun to speculate about, though I fear it may ruin the afternoons of a few HN commenters to see it mentioned.
Brutus Quidus: I've looked at your alleged alphabet for 30 seconds and have discovered all of the flaws. It is clear it will never work. First off, your O and Q are nearly impossible to distinguish. What if there's a piece of dirt on my scroll where I put the O? It's obvious you didn't do any research.
Claudius Acerbus: Is this serious? This will never ever work. Besides the achilles heel that if you have an N next to an I people will think it's an M, that circle thing looks just like a D. And if you have 2 D's on top of each other people will think it's a B! Christ! Err, wait, not born yet. You'll see!
If you go back to when the Latin Alphabet was introduced there were approximately 100 million people in the entire world, and only a subset of a subset would have been required to adopt this. Over nearly 3 millennia, the Latin alphabet has been improved upon and become widely adopted by even common-folk, to the point several billion people are familiar with it. You're task of adoption is several magnitudes harder.
Your alternative provides no significant value over the Latin Alphabet, unless you want to use it for a simple obfuscational encoding.
If you want to reduce the size and amount of visual information provided, look at Kanji, mathematical syntax, or shorthand notations (although these tend to vary by person).
Don't get so defensive. As it is it's not very good for tons of practical purposes, many that have been pointed out here. You even said that you can't interpret it as quickly as you can the Latin Alphabet, yet. Find a way to fix the flaws that have been pointed out, and come back. It's a novel approach and idea, but not practical for any use, currently.
and common 1- and 2- letter words need to look unambiguous when floating independent of a readily visible base- and top-line you'd see in most longer words.
I suspect it's an art installation or something though. I've seen much weirder.
20+ years of progress with unicode and thid happens...
Your sample paragraph of simplistic un-anchored dots is to the human visual system as line noise is to speech. Which is to say, just because some geeks can sync over the phone with a 300 baud modem doesn't mean a whole lot of useful communication will result.
Most of these look like spaghetti to me:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phrase_sanskrit.png
If I scoot my chair back 4 feet from the screen discerning anything is hopeless, despite the font size being somewhat large. Whereas at the same distance much smaller English text is discernible to me.
Gathering experimental evidence by having many different people from many different demographics read many different things, preferably under controlled conditions. Comparing the resulting statistics to comparable statistics regarding other writing systems. Analyzing the interaction between the human vision system and reading. Probably a dozen other things besides, some of which do indeed involve lab coats.
> How would Arabic look if you hadn't encountered it before?
Probably weird. Distinguishable as a writing script, though. Your point?
Anyway, assuming you're serious:
This script is certainly more compact than the Latin alphabet. It's also completely lacking in things like contrast, visual cues, and optimization for letter frequency. Furthermore, it's factually incorrect that the Latin alphabet was optimized for writing, and totally irrelevant that it was invented thousands of years ago.
Given that we have the Latin alphabet as a well-established and imminently functional existing standard, your argument simply aren't very convincing. Sorry.
Why don't I get it peer reviewed why I'm at it. Then I can post in on hacker news in 2014.
>> How would Arabic look if you hadn't encountered it before?
> Probably weird. Distinguishable as a writing script, though. Your point?
That you probably would have found many flaws in it to point out, many of them probably valid, in relation to what you are familiar with. You likely wouldn't have given it the time or consideration required to discover the positive points it may have that are discernible when using it in practice, which could outweigh some of the negative points people enjoy focusing on at first contact.
> It's also completely lacking in things like contrast, visual cues
On what are you basing that? Go to dotsies.org and look at the bottom-left of the page, where you can compare the doties paragraph to the text above it. Gradually move your chair back from your screen until you can distinguish nothing. You'll likely see the distinguishing visual cues in the normal text go away before those in the dotsies text, despite it taking up less than half the space.
> your argument simply aren't very convincing. Sorry.
No apology necessary. Though, arguments on both our sides are mostly superfluous, and arguments from those who haven't tried it are partly speculative. The key question is whether it is useful, and that can only be determined by trying it out.
My opinion is: if you're going to learn something enough to be fluent in it, why not make it a real language spoken (or in this case, written) by actual people?
And finally, I'll give the author twenty bucks if he can read arbitrary text that I supply. (This would have to be an in-person thing.)
I'm not sure what 75% as fast means. Faster or slower? (If slower, what the point?)
I would have chosen not to go the alphabetical order way to attributing dotsies. I'd have chosen single points for vowels, for example. And the consonants grouped by phonetic similarity. You're bound to Ctrl+ to be able to read anyway. So if you're making the dotsies bigger vertically to be able to distinguish things, why use only 5 vertical slots? 6 or 7 would allow more distinctive patterns. 2 dots at the bottom for plosives, 3 dots for fricatives, etc.
Seems interesting as a personal thing, but I'd venture it's hard to teach to someone, way more than you seem to believe. Have you already taught someone in a few 20 minute trainings?
There are only 26 letters. It's much easier than it seems. It just takes time to build up your speed and be able to recognize smaller typefaces.
1. The "physical" aspect of mental reading - mentally sounding out the words that are in front of me. This is quite fast already and is pretty mechanical.
2. Converting the words into meaning and registering it in my mind. This is the much harder task, and you actively need to focus to do this.
To see that these two are indeed parallel processes, notice that it's possible to "read" something in your mind without any of it actually registering while you think of something else, say a narrative about just how awesome your life would be if X or Y were true. I often have to actively break the internal narrative and pull myself back to focusing on what's read.
The focusing part is the real bottleneck, not the mechanical reading part. This is painfully obvious especially when you are trying to learn information-dense material such as Mathematics, where you have to pause to recall definitions, follow argumentation, and so on.
There's a reason children's books have such a large font. When we learn how to read, it's much easier to focus on large single characters. Only after we become accustomed to reading individual characters can we then start to recognize words.
One can't recognize the dot-positions anyway, but making it smaller makes it only harder.
"Optimized for writing, not reading?" You have to be kidding me, right?
Yes -- and the Romans had indoor plumbing, aquaducts, and crosswalks. All just as antiquated as the serif.
See there? I've fed the trolls.
-- I would love to see the brouhaha this would elicit from typophile.com.
Many letters are the exact same shape, shifted vertically 1/5th of a character height? A-E are completely identical but for position. This is terrible enough to be a show-stopper on its own.
Braille has all the advantages of this, but is FAR more readable, since each letter has its own distinct shape. You say in a different thread that "Braille has the same proportional shortcomings as normal text". This is false. Braille characters are a grid of a fixed number of dots (6 or 8), and every character is the same size. It also has numbers, punctuation...
The idea is provocative, but contains the seeds of its own destruction. If the deficiency in Latin script is that it is (putatively) "optimized" for one function and not another, why make the same (or rather opposite) mistake on purpose?
The thought is that it's low effort to click a button on a computer to change the font of something you're reading (vs high effort to do the analogous thing to text you've written). The intention is to augment latin text in a small way (you can use it when you feel like it) more so than to replace it.
> Wait, what problem does this solve?
It's helpful to consider the extremes. Let's say the convention was to represent the "A" sound you were supposed to draw a tropical island, including palm trees and a peaceful lagoon and a volcano. (And for the "B" sound, you draw a herd of buffalo, etc.) We would probably all agree that the palm trees are superfluous and should be removed. We'd probably further agree that maybe something even simpler like just the letter "A" would be an even bigger improvement. Desert islands take up a lot of space on paper, are a lot for the eye to look at, and when viewed en masse are less visually recognizable than simpler shapes.
Along that line of thinking, why not simplify even further? Whatever your objections, you'll probably concede 2 or 3 dots is simpler than most letters.
A valid objection would be that there are some detractions that outweigh the benefits of increased simplicity and efficiency, or that the benefits aren't significant enough to bother with. But, I think the jury is still out on that.
This reasoning reminds me of the "nutritionist" argument (as I understand it from Michael Pollan's book In Defense of Food), in which individual nutrients are presumed to contain in toto the benefits of the foods in which they are found. Sure, a leaf of spinach may contain some inert matter that is irrelevant to your body from a chemical point of view. But it has not been convincingly demonstrated (he argues) that "the good parts" can be extracted or understood separately from the whole.
My gut reaction, and I'm sticking with it, is that this is the reductio ad absurdum of a beautiful, human mystery. But take that with a grain of sea salt, as I was a student of "letters" before I was a hacker.
Except that in this case the before and after are both man-made.
- lower case L (l) would be a long vertical bar
- i would be the lower two dots filled and with a dot in the second highest position
You could then make some other common letters look like a vertical cross section:
- o could be the bottom dot and the middle dot
- s could be the top, middle, and bottom dots
- m could just be the bottom dot
- w could just be the top dot
More complex letters could represent crossing lines as gaps. For instance:
- t could be a vertical bar with the second highest dot empty
- k could be a vertical bar with the middle dot empty
You could add a sixth dot underneath the normal line for letters which commonly drop down below. For instance:
- j could be an i with an extra dot underneath
- p could be an o with an extra dot underneath
- g could be an un-dotted j
- y could be a v with an extra dot underneath
You could take advantage of certain letters which are the inverse of each other by inverting the dots (white dots become black, and black dots become white. For instance:
- z could be the inverse of s
- q could be the inverse of p (but with the lower dot still filled in)
For letters which are upside down versions of each other, just make the symbol upside down
- w would be an upside down m (as already shown above)
- n would be an upside down u
You could also add an extra dot above the normal line of reading to denote capitalization (kinda like a representation of the shift key). Doing this would make for 7 dots total.
I'm sure that not every letter would be representable using rules like this, but the less common letters could get the less obvious patterns.
The nice thing about doing it this way is that some words will kind of look like the shapes we have already memorized for those words. Kind of. If you squint.
This is a fun experiment, and I commend you for trying it. I look forward to seeing vs 2.0 :)
> This is a fun experiment, and I commend you for trying it. I look forward to seeing vs 2.0 :)
Thanks! I may code up something to let people pick different mappings and preview how it would look on some text. If I do I'll post it on HN.
http://dotsies.org/design-your-own/How would you distinguish between AAA, BBB, CCC, DDD, EEE without a baseline of text (for example, in a headline)? Without a reference for the top and bottom of the text, here's no way to know whether the dots are high or low.