A writing system that nobody has ever considered adopting

[fivemack]

Comments

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Man, that image buggers up my FL page like howdy.

[bugshaw.livejournal.com]

They are lovely squiggles.

[del-c.livejournal.com]

Just for once, Opera behaved nicely for that one, even before it went behind the cut.

I count 412 squiggles. What's the significance of that? I thought at first it was going to be a power of two.

Dyslexic people would utterly hate you if this got adopted. Have you read any works on readable text? It turns out descenders, ascenders etc. are more than just nice patterns, they actually have readability advantages (letters that are near-mirrors of each other are not nice to said dyslexics, however).

One of the new Vista fonts has numerals that ascend and descend, instead of sticking resolutely to the same height. Once you get used to the weirdness, they actually do make it easier to read and memorise large numbers. apparently it's only in recent times that numbers had to be even in height, and this was a fashion statement.

[ceb.livejournal.com]

Can I use them?

[megamole.livejournal.com]

majQa!

[simont]

If it'd been me, I think, I'd have done 1 setlinecap as well as 1 setlinejoin. (Or equivalent if you didn't actually use PostScript, of course.)

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

So we don't actually *know* if maybe, if I stare at it too hard, Cthulhu might appear? Guess I'd better be careful; I certainly feel *something* weird happening behind my eyes when I look at it.

[simont]

Rather surprisingly, I note that the sequence 1,4,26,412,11072,... does not appear to be in OEIS. I think that's the first time I've ever looked up a sequence in it that turned out not to be there! Perhaps you should send it in. (After first computing another five terms, I expect, by a cunning dodge I haven't thought of and/or the application of more raw computation than I can conveniently bring to bear or both.)

[davidcook.livejournal.com]

... possibly because Chinese already exists :-)

I'll take del_c's word for it that there are 412 - which is very close to the number of distinct sounds (not counting tones) in (Mandarin) Chinese. I'm sure there would be some clever way to map all of the non-intersecting paths through a 5x5 grid (I guess that's what they are, at least) to the Chinese syllables ...