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Learn to read a binary font by reading a story

dotsies.org

196 pointstrogdoro128 comments

This seems like it could actually be a real improvement on written Latin if it adopted a real phonetic alphabet. Just transposing all of my existing graphemes for new, smaller ones seems a little silly.

(And since what you're really asking is not for people to learn a new alphabet, but to learn a new symbol for every word in their lexicon, it wouldn't be that much more of a leap. Think about it.)

Thinking about it-- you increase your bandwidth immediately. You can knock out /c/, /q/ and /x/ right off-- maybe a couple other consonants (/j/?) with creative digraphs (/gi/?). Use the extra bits to add in the more confusing vowels sounds, and appropriate current digraphs where they aren't confusing.

Chording becomes your standard input device; just press every sound that's in the word at once and move on. Anyone would be able to type as fast as they could talk, at least, and read far faster. Text to speech and vice versa would be much easier. Machine translation would make you perfectly legible to the non-phonetically-literate, and the vastly improved typing speed would more than make up for any minor hiccups. It would be much, much easier to teach English to children and non-natives, so much so that we'd stop using letters for everyday writing. Alphabetic English would be bizarrely unintelligible within a couple generations, but again, thanks to machine translation, perfectly readable.

Of course you get all of this just from having a phonetic alphabet; a concise binary representation is just icing on the cake. If your goal is to get people to read different, why not go for the grand prize?

> You can knock out /c/, /q/ and /x/ right off-- maybe a couple other consonants (/j/?) with creative digraphs (/gi/?).

Sounds a bit like omniglot.com/writing/franklin.htm. Franklin scrapped c, j, q, w, x, and y.

The idea sounds reasonable to me. He gave up on it after a while though. I'm guessing the more differences you have, the bigger the barrier to adoption tends to be.

> just press every sound that's in the word

Sounds reminiscent of omniglot.com/writing/shorthand.htm.

> Chording becomes your standard input device

Check out http://dotsies.org/typing.html.

Yeah, it's been proposed before... It's pretty hard to convince everyone they should start using a new language nobody else can read. (More people now speak Klingon than Esperanto. Ouch.)

I think computers change the equation, though. Machine translation would be almost impeccable. Using phonetics visually would make chording intuitive in a way it hasn't been until now... You can do a soft launch where you start out teaching people to type phonetically, but showing them alphabetic English. Gradually work into the idea that the buttons you press could be their own writing system. And the benefits would greatly reward anyone who decided to work in the system.

> Check out http://dotsies.org/typing.html.

I hate to say it, but that's kinda the opposite of a chording keyboard. The idea with chording is you press symbols simultaneously to write an entire word with a single keystroke (this is how stenographers are able to type >300wpm). That looks like using multiple keys to type a single character, which is an interesting hack, but ergonomically a step back from a conventional keyboard, yeah?

> The idea with chording is you press symbols simultaneously to write an entire word

That's not typically the case - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chording_keyboard.

> this is how stenographers are able to type >300wpm

Stenography is very fast, but can't replace a normal keyboard (i.e. you wouldn't want to use MS Word with it or code with it). Also it has a large learning curve and can vary from person to person.

> using multiple keys to type a single character, which is an interesting hack, but ergonomically a step back

On the other hand, you don't have to move your fingers around - they stay in one place. And it makes possible a very large number of key combinations (when using both hands) that can be used as optional shortcuts for typing common words.

You got me there, I was using "chording" when I really meant stenotype. Just being careless, I guess...

I was curious about the "More people now speak Klingon than Esperanto" thing, but from what I can tell it's emphatically not true. The number of fluent Esperantists is somewhere in the tens or hundreds of thousands, whereas the number of fluent speakers of Klingon is closer to a few dozen.

Here are some sources, including a particularly cool 2009 Salon article on Klingon, Esperanto and conlangs in general:

http://www.salon.com/2009/06/03/invented_languages/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_language

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080228012811AA...

Thanks for doing the legwork-- when you put it like that, yeah, it's pretty obviously wrong. I think where I ultimately got that from was a claim by Guinness that Klingon was the most widely spoken fictional language, which someone took to mean constructed language, and it kind of snowballed. Oops.

> Machine translation would be almost impeccable.

This is completely wrong. Current machine translation struggles not because languages are hard, but because translation is an inherently hard problem. Humans can only translate reasonably after years of training. Semanticists can only provide a formal logical treatment of very small fragments of language, which indicates that a logical language would be either incomplete or not completely formal.

The bottom line is that translation involves understanding meaning, which involves a lot of interpretation and world knowledge, which is very difficult to put into a computer, whatever the kind of language you're trying to translate.

Compared to this, speech recognition has been relatively successful, so a language with a phonemic alphabet is not very urgent.

Hangul, the Korean writing system, is at once phonetic and syllabic. Each "symbol" represents a syllable, but each sub-symbol represents a particular sound in the syllable; and each sub-sub-symbol encodes phonetic information about how it should be pronounced. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#Letter_design for a better explanation.

A binary representation of the Hangul system could be very interesting. Use the symbol 1 for "vowel base" and +1 for "high", +2 for "high front", +3 for "high back"… You could eventually have each byte represent a syllable. It'd be like chmod commands + phonetics.

There goes my evening…

Thanks for the link! I've never studied Korean before, looks quite interesting. I'd also be curious to see if there were a way to merge the phonetically featural traits of Hangul with the narrowly mathematical nature of dotsies. Do update us with where you get to thinking about Chmodish :)

I've been learning Hangul recently, and now every language that doesn't encode syllables into the writing system just seems immensely flawed to me. Hangul seems like a very intuitive, logical writing system. There are relatively few exceptions to the rules it sets out, though I think that's likely because it's such a young language -- more and more seem to be creeping in over time as dialects evolve.

> I think that's likely because it's such a young language

Do you mean language or writing system? Hangul is ~500 years old, comparatively new for a somewhat widely used writing system, though it's an odd case given that it's not really adapted from another system. The Korean language itself is much older.

Yes, sorry, I meant the writing system.

I'm sorry for being a pedantic d-bag.

> Chording becomes your standard input device

That's exactly what steganographers do, and they go further along by condensing syllabes, words or even phrases in a single chord. Pretty amazing, although it seems a lot harder than this, and not as good for reading.

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

In case it wasn't just a mind-typo: stenographer and steganographer are two different things. (Although I guess one could argue that they are quite similar)

Well played, brain.

Unless you're a geek interested in language, computer science, or programming who doesn't want to sink a lot of time into a mostly useless hobby, you should read about Lojban.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban

i'm sure right after this carefully thought, polite and welcoming comment, he'll most definitely stop what he's doing, and do what you suggest.

(disclaimer: i'm just generally against comments like these, my apologies to other readers that didn't have to read this)

I'm going to school right now to become a court reporter / stenographer. Basically, I type on a funny looking keyboard (http://www.acculaw.com/images/products/display/stenograph%20...) where you're not so much typing letters as much as you're typing sounds. So the word "talk", for example would be written "tauk", with each letter of the word pressed at the same time (if possible. Some words you need to come back for a second, third, or god forbid forth stroke).

You have to write at 225 words a minute in order to graduate, but some people are able to write at speeds of 300+ words a minute. If you look at the keyboard, the machine is separated into two halves. On the left half there are only 9 keys, but each letter of the alphabet can be written with those 9 keys because it's context sensitive. The letter "t" by itself would be the letter t, but if it's next to a "k", it might become the letter d. You mentioned that we can knock out certain letters such as c, and that's indeed what is done with stenography. The word "car" is written "kar". There are sometimes conflicts, like "sell" and "cell", so you still need a way to write a c, but that's the gist of it.

Worth mentioning is that there are only 4 vowel keys on the machine (the vowels are the keys that are on the bottom), but you can write a lot of different sounds with these four keys. A, O, E, and U are the vowels that are on there, and if you press one of those keys individually, you'd write a short vowel of that key. If you wanted to write a short I, you'd press E and U together. You would write long vowel sounds by combining different vowels together. So for example, if you wanted to write a long e sound, you'd write aoe, long U sound would be aou, long a sound would be ai (or aeu depending on how you look at it), long o is oe, and long i is all the vowels together at once.

It can be hard to read what you've written if you're not extremely good at it. The word dime, for example, you would see as "TKAOEUPL". There are a few different theories out there, and even if everyone learns the same theory, everyone puts their own little spin on it, so if you wanted to read what someone else wrote, it might be tough.

This is the layout of the keyboard if anyone is interested (http://dmc122011.delmar.edu/ba/crtrgallery/images/steno_keyb...)

As an outsider, I don't see why reading "TKAOEUPL" instead of "dime" would be an improvement (except for checking precisely what you wrote) for even professionals. Is there a reason why these machines don't convert the roughly-phonetic words into English words? I would think it wouldn't even be too hard to program, even with those 'little spin's, considering how far we've come with grammar checkers and gestural keyboards like Swype.

It's funny how when someone on HN says, "My method works well, but there are some pathological cases, like X" someone else on HN will invariably reply with, "Yeah, but I don't see why X would be an improvement."

This is a bad practice not only because it misrepresents the original thought (the person was not claiming that X was an improvement, they clearly called it pathological), but more perniciously it subtly erodes the (altogether sensible and honorable) habit of good people to give full disclosure of their ideas and methods. To put it simply: attacking someone on the weaknesses that they themselves have revealed about their own process or idea is neither fair nor useful, and does not contribute to the discussion.

If it came across that way, I'm sorry - I'm genuinely curious why such machines don't convert what was typed into English. In the past it was almost certainly a lack of computational power (or zero) - what about now? I was only asking about the reading portion, the writing is pretty clearly faster.

I'm not in any claiming that they should be typing on QWERTY. I'm wondering why the pathological case exists at all when it seems it doesn't have to, and if there's a reason for it that I'm not aware of. Maybe there's a market for machines like this to spit out English, maybe there isn't, but I'm not in the field so I really don't know.

Ah, I'm sorry, I actually gave the wrong impression. On the machine I own, you can choose whether or not to have it display English, or what you've actually written, or a split screen with English on one side and what you've actually written on the other.

Reading it in English isn't as ideal as you may think, though. I actually prefer reading the notes. The problem is that if you're writing at 225 words a minute, it can be very easy to accidentally leave off a letter, or add an extra letter to a stroke. The English might come up as come up as a completely different word, where as if you're reading what you've actually written, it can be a lot easier to see your mistake and read the correct word.

For example, let's use the word Dime again. If I'm going at 225 and I accidentally add an "R" to the word dime, it'll look like "DRAOEUPL". In English, this would read "Did there come a time", where as if I were looking at my notes, it would be obvious to me that I intended for that to be "dime". If you're reading back at court, you don't want to make mistakes like that.

Makes sense, and yeah, that kind of error is something that grammar checkers still fail miserably at. Thanks!

It's good to know that it has at least been done. There are so many places where technology lies untapped, I was half-expecting this to be one of them since it's such an old field (and with close ties to the government).

I'm half expecting them to replace this field entirely with speech to text technology in 50 years or so.

50 years or so? Kurzweil would have another heart attack if he read this ;)

dime going as "TKAOEUPL" reminds me of this: http://i.imgur.com/EFzu9.png

I can write 225 words a minute with a normal keyboard. According to http://speedtest.10fastfingers.com/ anyway.

The idea that redundancy in language is a sign of inefficiency is wrong. In fact it increases efficiency because it makes it less likely to misread or misinterpret something. I don't think you'd actually be increasing your bandwidth, if you remove superfluous letters your eyes won't have to look over them but you won't process the actual information any faster, you've just eliminated additional cues.

While it is possible to make a phonemic alphabet (phonetic would capture people's accents as well, which is probably not what you want), this removes the connection words have with their foreign origins. Plus pronunciation might change and you don't want to rewrite all books whenever that happens. You have to learn reading & writing anyway, so it might as well be a separate language to some extent, so that it can be more stable.

There's simpel-fonetik, which is extremely intuitive. It's basically a mapping from IPA to latin letters. Example:

When you read Simpel-Fonetik words, you must pay attention to each letter. Remember: each letter has always the same sound, the sound given in the Simpel-Fonetik alphabet, regardless what letter is next to it.

And here it is re-written in Simpel-Fonetik:

Wen ju riid Simpel-Fonetik wörds, ju mast pei ätenshon tu iitsh leter. Rimember: iitsh leter häs olweis the seim saund, the saund given in the Simpel-Fonetik alfabet, rigaardles wat leter is nekst tu it.

http://www.simpelfonetik.com/

Funnily enough, this looks like a German person with no actual knowledge of English trying to write down what someone speaking English is saying.

I love this kind of thing. I tried something similar a few years ago, after visiting Turkey and seeing their language. I'd had a single character for each sound, though (i.e. 'å' instead of 'ei' for the 'a' sound in 'late').

In case anyone else was wondering why it is still "is" and not "iz" in Simpel Fonetik, and how they justify "sh" as being composed of "s" and "h", the FAQ actually answers that.

I disagree about the 's', but otherwise I like it.

German's most newbie-ish computer magazine, Computer Bild, actually uses a pretty system to explain the pronunciation of IT terms to the layman.

There is problem with phonetic alphabets: people have different accents, and so something that is obvious for an Englishman is confusing for an Australian, or an American.

When I was (briefly) doing some linguistics, there were several times when I spent minutes trying to work out what a certain set of IPA symbols were. (I was pretty good normally, but words with multiple/varying/regional pronunciations are very confusing.)

Obviously, with more practice it'd be easier to read, and if the alphabet were in use around the world, pronunciations and accents would converge.

Not really. Greek has a phonetic alphabet, and we're doing fine with accents. You just standardize words and spell them in one way, and the people speaking the dialect just spell them the same, even knowing they sound different. It's not a problem, and you can even emulate the accent in writing for whatever purpose.

Cool, I didn't realise that Greek was a phonetic alphabet!

I think there is a difference between an alphabet that one uses from birth, and one that you try to teach to adults. In the former case, you're starting from scratch. In the latter case, you've got your old alphabet confusing things.

Evidently, phonetic alphabets are possible; but for an adult to learn to use one it would take practice and effort, and many people would probably be fairly resistant to that ("our old one is perfectly good", "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" etc.).

That's true, but everyone is resistant to everything. A problem with English is that there are more homophones than there are in Greek. When you see a Greek word, you can pronounce it and, in the vast majority of times, you know what it means. Not so in English, where there are many more homophones. Context helps, though.

Phonetic alphabet seems to be a beast greatly different to what this Dotsie font tries to achieve. Dotsie appears to be about compression, reading speed and more utilization of word-picture association.

Phonetic alphabets are not that great a leap, I think. Hungarian has a mostly phonetic 44-word alphabet, and if there is an advantage in reading/writing speed compared to English, it's rather small. I agree with the "easier teaching" part though.

I really like this approach (even if I'm still not entirely convinced about the benefits of dotsies).

For a while, I've had this idea of a book that starts in standard English, and gradually alters the grammar and introduces new words - so that halfway-through it's written in somewhat of a pidgin/creole language, and by the end you're reading a completely different language (e.g. French or Japanese). I'm not aware of such a thing existing, or even being feasible for that matter, but I think it would be interesting.

I had a similar thought a while back when reading "A Clockwork Orange". On page one the slang ("droogs", "horrorshow", "moloko", ...) is rather jarring and it's not entirely clear what it all means, but over time the meaning becomes apparent.

Ah yes, it's fun to say those words while listening to a little of the old Ludwig Van. Maybe even a little of the old in and - alright I'll stop there.

Similar: Giuseppe Peano (the mathematician) proposed that a variation of Latin be used as an international and scientific language—in particular, a version that dropped all the affixes at the end of words and relied wholly on word order instead of inflection, which he called Interlingua[1] and has since come to be known as Latino sine Flexione (Latin without inflections). His article which introduced the idea started in Latin and gradually dropped different inflections as he discussed them, so by the end, his article was written in Latino sine Flexione[2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latino_sine_flexione not to be confused with the other international auxiliary language called Interlingua which is also a generic Romance language. [2]: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35803/35803-h/35803-h.htm

Your idea would be much more practical for French than Japanese. Even though there are some changes of word order and grammatical forms in Romance languages that don't directly correspond to English, the differences between English and Japanese seem likely to be irreconcilable into any kind of pidgin dialect. On the other hand, there are far more cognates between English and Japanese.

I wonder to what extent you could do this automatically given a text in two languages (e.g. Harry Potter). From a quick google it looks as though text alignment might fall in the category of "possible" NLP problems[1], so it might be feasible on the sentence level..

[1] http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/J/J93/J93-1006.pdf

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/steele.pdf by Guy Steele is a little like that.

Not sure if this is worth the effort, but brilliant approach to learning. I've often had fun playing with inventing my own alphabets and stuff -- if you could actually learn to read this font at a decent speed, it would be fun to click a bookmarklet anytime you wanted some privacy :)

I love reading, and I read pretty fast - I've often thought that the existing approach in most textbooks where they give you a short (5-10 line text) with tons of new words and grammar, and then when you're done working through that, give you a new one with a ton of new words, is non-ideal. Once I'm done learning all the new words, you should give me five pages with text that only uses the words I've already learnt, to "fix" it - and to give me a feeling of mastery...

Very interesting thoughts!

> it would be fun to click a bookmarklet

You can grab a bookmarklet for this at dotsies.org (the blue button).

Could you make this bookmarklet toggle between regular/dotsies?

That could probably be done. What's the use case? Maybe if you think of a good plot for the http://dotsies.org/game I'll take a stab at it :)

how's this for an idea, inspired by this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxX_bVluflo it would be an investigation into a world that got turned into dots, or something. That way you could have lots of dotsies font all around, and a bunch of text slowly turning into dotsies for practice. You might also consider color coding the letters so that you have an additional channel of hints that you can toggle on and off. To make the reader have a more gradual slope.

This is a really nice idea. Reminds me of Guy Steele's 'Growing a language' talk (http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid=-8860158196198824415) and generally of building a formal system by combining primitives.

This reminds me of Elian Script[1]. It is not particularly optimized for reading but it is extremely easy to learn and become proficient in.

The usual habit to develop ones own handwriting style when using this, makes it something rather unique to each individual. This also improves writing speed because you optimize the letters to suit your own writing style. We both (friend and me) use it as a form of poor-man's-cryptography for diaries and stuff we write in public (trains, buses, etc).

My friend's Elian compared to mine is almost unrecognisable at first glance. But if you understand the few basic rules for the writing system, you can read either of our versions very effectively in only a short amount of time. And those rules are preposterously simple. You do not have to memorize different shapes for each letter of the alphabet. That's a definite plus.

[1]: http://www.ccelian.com/concepca.html

This seems like one of those things that will push something useful out of my head if I learn it.

Absolutely. I stopped reading a couple of pages in because I didn't want to forget where I live.

Why not stack Morse code horizontally? At least Morse code is somewhat designed to take advantage of the frequency distribution of letters (e.g., e is a single dot.)

Try it out and post a link! It would be interesting to see.

It has been done: http://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/58144

Interesting! Here's a similar version that's more horizontally condensed:

http://dotsies.org/morse

I get asked this a lot, so I threw this together just now.

Here's a shorter one. The first one is a bit long:

http://dotsies.org/stories/the-runaway-couple.html

If you have any preferences for any stories from gutenberg.org I can add those too.

are these programmatically generated? if so, would it be possible to get a script to make one of these from say an article scraped by instapaper?

You can grab the bookmarklet at dotsies.org to use the font on any web page. If you're referring to going gradually from letters to dots then yes, happy to post the script.

I couldn't read anything past the title.

In my opinion, it would make more sense to read braille by looking at it. However, it would be cool if this were some sort of alien language/hidden language in a video game or something.

I can see this being applied in labels etc. for computer vision. Some kind of control/orientation character could make it similar to a QR code but actually readable by humans.

Generally, though, if something's going to be read by both, you may as well just have a label with plain English + a QR code. No reason why it has to be readable by both.

Reminds me of Marain, the language and alphabet invented by Iain M. Banks for the Culture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture#Language

There's even a least one font available: http://danielsolisblog.blogspot.fr/2010/09/free-font-marain-...

I've always wondered what Conway's Game of Life was trying to tell me...

So... if I want the single letter 'B' by itself, it looks exactly the same as the letters A, C, D or E?

In other words, 'DE' look exactly the same, without any reference, as 'AB', and there is a haphazard set of similar combinations?

I'm not doing that. Learn Braille instead.

think differently. right now our brain processes letter by letter, with dotsies it will become symbol by symbol. i'm reading it for some time, haven't had that difficulty.

there will always be letters next to it anyway, easy to see the base, if you have to.

A letter is a symbol. This is just switching to new symbols.

It sort of makes the words become symbols.

Bit of a false dichotomy there-- you already read words as individual symbols; otherwise spellchecking wouldn't be a thing. They're just a little wider than these.

sorry i started it.. i meant perceiving a word as one symbol vs a combination of letters. that will speed up and increase the amount of information we can take in, drastically.

considering we do use few thousand words max, to do 99% of our communication (sorry forgot where i read this article), learn those symbols, your eyes now can see much more at once, and brain can digest accordingly.

this is a serious upgrade folks, not just saying, i've been reading dotsies for a while now, i'm dead serious, this could become what my children will read and write with..

That's what I'm saying, you already do that. When you read a line of text your eyes move several words at a time, but your area of focus is only wide enough to really see a few letters at a time. You are recognizing some words wholesale, simply ignoring others and filling in with context.

The impression that you have seen the entire line of text is a clever illusion developed inside your brain. You very rarely pay attention to individual letters as graphemes symbolizing individual phonemes; you simply can't think that fast (and in fact, you probably do not have a very good conscious idea of which letters symbolize which sounds in reality).

Not to say that dotsies aren't neat, and they could have some benfit to reading speed, but really all they are is thinner. Reading is already a pretty amazing superpower that you have.

Now if you're serious about wanting your kids to read better than you, check out what I wrote about a phonetic alphabet above. That would be a serious improvement.

If you want your kids to read faster than you get them on speed reading training - just takes constant training.

Teach them sign language, while young when it's really easy to learn (harder for us adults, though apparently not hard either) - it could open up a lot of doors, and if I'm not mistaken it's somewhat internationalized? If enough of the new generation groks that, imagine what it does for communication.

Teaching them a new alphabet nobody uses won't help anything, other than theri own shorthand - but that can be improved even better by teachin ghtem real shorthand.

Also consider having them learn a second language - Mandarin probably. Throw in a romance language and they'll have no trouble learning new languages in a snap throughout life.... they'll naturally see patterns and grab concepts adults who grow up with a single language/alphabet don't.

Actually, sign languages are quite distinct. Distinct to the extent that British and American sign language are not mutually comprehensible (ASL is in fact related to French sign language). In Norway (where I'm from), some of the sign language dialects vary a lot more than the spoken dialects as well.

Yeah, and speaking for myself, actually parsing the words is never the slowest part of comprehending a piece of text. Much slower is figuring out what a whole thought is saying, figuring out how it fits into the fabric of the text, figuring out whether it’s right, what it says about the author’s agenda, what news ideas it provokes, etc.

There’s certainly some marginal advantage to come from improving word parsing speed, but just like any speed reading technique, that advantage goes only so far, I would guess. (For instance, if I’m only trying to recognize words & nominally parse the grammar, I can move my eyes much faster and cover text extremely quickly, but when I’m doing that, I’ll typically realize at the end of a paragraph or page that I don’t fully understand what’s being said because I haven’t taken the time to think through all the implications.)

This looks exactly like Chinese.

Chinese people don't read line by line, they read paragraph by paragraph. Chinese has the advantage of reading very fast, and in fewer length[1]. The drawbacks however, are much larger character set (which results in higher illiteracy), and slightly slower writing speed.

But English/Romantic languages are not best suited for symbolic reading, because there are declensions. In Chinese, do-did-done are the same words. Every meaning is concluded by the context.

[1]: http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/03/daily-c...

> This looks exactly like Chinese.

Looks more like a worse version of Hangul.

One word: context. You already use it every day.

Example? Your own comment. How do we know which definition of the word "look" you are using? Context.

Without any surrounding reference points, they are indeed exactly the same.

Reading individual single characters where vertical spacing is your only key, with no reference, or even with some, especially the single dot versions, could be troublesome. Also uncommon (except in programming - but I think of this as more a novel way to read prose than code)

Also - standalone letters tend to be capitalized - and those have a reference bar above them... so it's not all bad.

Still - good point.

Learn braille,good idea. I'd go with learn ASL (sign?) as another suggestion too.... though this dotsie thing is definitely thought provoking (on the reading side - not the chording/typing side - that's pointless)

What about diacritical marks? Without them it's restricted to English.

Here are some accents. I'm adding them to the font as people request them at https://twitter.com/dotsiesfont

http://dotsies.org/m/#%F8x+isf+%F4x+pt%F2q+xysjhh%E1

Missing 'ñ' and 'ü'. ¡quiero leer español!

Last time your project came up, I wanted to ask if you've done any research into the various already existing shorthand writing systems ?

When I tried to find out more about those 10 years ago, a lot of sources were old and hard to find, but with a bit of persistence I found some PDFs and websites on a system called "Gregg Shorthand". Fortunately today it's right there on Wikipedia for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregg_shorthand

Greg and Pitman both look interesting - http://omniglot.com/writing/shorthand.htm

There's a potential to borrow some of the concepts while typing in dotsies, utilizing some of the many possible modifier keys that having the alphabet on both hands opens up (hold down c with one hand and typing h with the other hand, etc.).

This reminds me a great deal of Mark Twain's plan for the improvement of English Spelling:

http://www.i18nguy.com/twain.html

Attributed to Mark Twain, but unlikely to be written by him:

http://www.spellingsociety.org/journals/j31/satires.php http://www.spellingsociety.org/news/media/spoofs.php

For non-native english speakers, the text on the home (http://dotsies.org/) is a bit easier to grasp.

I haven't put in the time to become fluent in reading Dotsies (Dotsie?) yet, but find it fascinating. I can imagine a multitouch keyboard made for Dotsies, that could be quite a bit more efficient once learned.

Has any research been done on optimizing graphemes and common words for multitouch typing?

This seems flawed in that it arbitrarily translates regular symbols into what looks like a graphic error soup. I feel like letter and di/tri-graph frequencies should have been considered, as well as conventional expectations (m looks thicker than i, f.i.).

The end of the story looks like 'space invaders', and I have the urge to shoot the letters.

Omg, there should totally be a game like that to help people learn!

Ok, here's a start:

http://dotsies.org/game/

You can move it around with the arrow keys. It says "alien".

Now what should it do?

I added some characters. Someone give me a plot!

Ok, now the alien can eat the other characters, but I don't know why. Anyone good at making up plots?

Rather than alien, how about a hungry catapillar. And the hungry catapillar can only eat the next word in the sequence. Ok now it sounds like hungry a katamari. nom nom.

A good idea would be to make a typespeed clone: http://typespeed.sourceforge.net/

Or any kind of game where you have to type words to advance. In fact, while we're already on the Space Invaders idea, you could make a clone where the invaders represent common words and to destroy them you have to type them out. Oh, and the invaders shoot single letters or two-letter combinations which you can type out to defend against. Also, you have to defeat the invaders from bottom up and to shoot at one you have to move into it's line below it, So you have to choose between dodging by typing out an invader in a different line or defending against a shot.

And what about UTF-8 letters (for example ā, ž, š)? How can you make them by using dotsies?

Just add the accents at the top - http://dotsies.org/m/#%F8x+isf+%F4x+pt%F2q+xysjhh%E1

I want to be able to read QR code by naked eye. Lets see how far I get.

Interesting learning paradigm but on the "optimized for reading" side, we already have the Chinese alphabet which is probably at least as dense as dotsies.

genious.. my favorite part of the day is to come home and read some dotsies since i discovered it..

This is a very cool effort and method to teach a very silly font/language idea.

This is super sweet. I just did the whole thing, now I can read Dotsie!

It is fuckin' cool, I really liked that.

the density reminds me of chinese

No that it's necessary, but I can't see any comment anywhere here or on the dotsies about numbers...

Also - diacriticials. This works fine in English, but pretty much every other place that uses the latin alphabet needs to use some kind of extra marks - even if we ignore the ones that are basically de-facto unused these days.... but in spanish the ´ is rather importnat to indicate emphasis and hence meaning or past tense, the ¨ is used occasionally, and n and ñ are two different letters, rather important if you want to be saying "happy new year" instead of "happy new anus" (año = year)

perhaps an alternate version for different languages? Spanish should be easy considering we only have to take into account ´ and ¨ as a diacritical - the rest "ll" and 'ñ' are taught in school as separate and distinct letters in the alphabet (as htey relate directly to pronunciation, no exceptions- ll is always a y, ñ is always like "ny" - not sure about the ¨ - it's not used often, and the difference is subtle - though possibly important - common in people's names I think, where you'd want to get it right. - have to look it up.

Numbers are unaltered. Optimizing them wouldn't save much space in normal english text, since they're rare.

Hey, new anus is a perfectly respectable holiday.

Here are some examples of accents: http://dotsies.org/m/#%F8x+isf+%F4x+pt%F2q+xysjhh%E1.

I'm adding more to the font as they're being requested.

For what purpose?

Mostly for space-efficiency. See http://dotsies.org for a better description.

Dotsies aren't all that space-efficient, though, when compared to regular old text. For example, in this comparison:

http://i.imgur.com/Ldd70.png

I'd argue that the text on the right, in the green font, is just as readable as the dotsies, while taking up less space.

I don't like dotsies, but if you subtract the bottom row's area where the letters aren't, the dotsie comes out to actually around 25k.

That's probably largely because the circuits in your brain have become finely honed on latin characters, after reading letters many millions of times for many years.

It's difficult to know how that image would appear to someone who was equally acclimated to both. At the moment no such person exists.

One clue might be how they compare to each other after you scoot your chair back from your computer until both have become blurry. When you get far enough away that you can't distinguish anything in the green paragraph, can you see any distinguishing characteristics in the red one? You won't be able to make them out, of course, but can you see that there are light and dark areas?

I've put about five hours in to this (The magnificent motivating power of procrastinating on something-else-you-need-to-do), and already I feel like I can identify individual dotsie words from a greater distance than I can the Roman words.

So I suspect your thesis may not be entirely unfounded.

Hold on, that's really not a fair comparison at all... look at the height of each line.

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