Show HN: 433 – How to make a font that says nothing | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: 433 – How to make a font that says nothing

untested.sonnet.io

51 pointsrpastuszak11 comments

Long time fan of your art and writing.

Is the idea here with Coffeeshop mode that typos can be dealt with later?

It seems like the gimmick of Ensō is that it's write-only and doesn't allow you to edit anything, so not being able to see your typos might be for the best actually.

Spellcheck and autocorrect are disabled when Coffeeshop Mode is on.

(although, IIRC, you can override that)

Another reason: autocorrect/autocomplete can trigger visible previews/highlights on the screen.

(thinking about this out loud here: what about IME/pinyin? That works well in both modes, it's necessary)

Thanks! And yes, although the same idea applies to Ensō in general.

Looking at the feedback from people, I see two camps: those who rely on autocomplete and those who abhor it.

I normally use it in two ways:

- quickly turn it on/off when someone is passing by, so I can carry on writing undistracted

- keep it on for several minutes at a time, esp. when writing in a busy public place

I always loved the idea of the Dotsies glyph system for coffeeshop mode. It's a font that converts the English alphabet into a compact dot notation.

Never got around to becoming fluent in it, but I'd like to someday.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240418032751/https://dotsies.o...

Very cool, like <input type="password"> except with whitespace so you retain a vague sense of the wordshapes :) I could honestly see myself using this in a coffeeshop for the compromise between privacy and feedback.

Thanks! I use it all the time. Someone on lobste.rs mentioned Redacted Script (https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Redacted+Script) and I'm considering building something similar, even if just for fun, but for the entire first unicode plane, since otherwise the characters wouldn't get masked.

Reminds me of dotsies [1]. However the goal of dotsies to keep it still readable and use less space.

What are the odds someone in a coffee shop is able to read dotsies as well?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18703805

Ah, the original site is dead but I found this: https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/dotsies.htm

The way dotsies stack remind me a little bit of Cistercian Numerals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cistercian_numerals)

I am thinking about adding a little semi-hidden "Toy box" option with little experiments, incl. generative art/playthings like drawing vines during typing or a spacial writing system.

(I'm very hesitant to do that since I want to keep Ensō as distraction free as possible)

Thanks for the sharing, installed and ready to try for my next coffeeshop session

Let me know how it goes! I'm in bug bashing mode atm

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