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Comment by tiddchristopher | Hacker News Reader

Typographically, this has horrible legibility: the letters are difficult to distinguish and recognize on an individual basis. This contributes to poor readability when the letters are grouped to form passages of text. This seems much more about compacting information in a human-decipherable format than creating a more readable alphabet.

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.

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> letters are difficult to distinguish and recognize on an individual basis

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.

Please explain the advantages of this over reading Braille dots (which lots of sighted people can do already), and please explain the lack of reports by sighted people saying "hey, I noticed that reading in Braille is faster and easier than with the regular alphabet."

Look at some text in braille and look at some text in dotsies. It looks pretty different. Dotsies letters are smashed together so the words look like shapes of their own. If you did that with braille it would likely be confusing due to each letter having 2 rows of dots, and it would be stretched out to about the same proportion as normal text.

Now you're aiming for the laurels of hieroglyphic writing, which has kind of lost almost every battle it fought with alphabets and syllabaries for the last couple of thousand years. It's not even convincing that this will be a good hieroglyphic system, let alone better than the alphabet.

It has characteristics of both. The words are is still made up of letters.

If you're honestly interested in knowing how I came to that conclusion, here's my proof:

Try telling apart "be" and "ad", with no nearby words. They are identical, because you don't know where the baseline is.

True, but it's very rare that you see "be" and "ad" floating out in space by themselves. They are usually next to other words, which give them plenty of context. If they are by themselves, a dash or box can be added for context.

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