Re: A Pictographic system that makes fonts obsolete

--- Nokta Kanto <red5_2@...> wrote:
> Surely it wouldn't make fonts obsolete.  Are you
> propsing this as a font encoding,
> or as a text encoding?
As I mentioned on my web page, I meant it only to
replace fonts for pictographic languages with many
thousands of characters.  It seems much more efficient
fot those types of character sets.

<snip>
>
> But, given that it's an English font we're talking
> about, it's a waste of space to be
> able to encode Greek letters, or upside-down F's, or
> Russian Ya, and with
> different kinds of serifs.  Do the majority of
> possible encodings on the 5x5 grid
> produce valid Piktok characters? Aside from the text
> bloat, characters that should
> be the same but are encoded slightly differently
> will bring up lots of text handling
> problems.
>
I see your point.  It takes more bits per word than it
should if an optimum encoding scheme were used.  On
the other hand, the document could be encoded in
something like a 16 bit format allowing 65,536
characters, and the word processor software would use
a lookup dictionary to extract the shape encoding from
the arbitrary, but more compact text encoding.

If we take the average English word to be 5 characters
plus a space, that's 6 bytes or 48 bits per word, so
16 bits per word would be pretty compact compared to
English. And if English's full 48 bits were used to
encode characters that would allow 281,474,976,710,656
different characters.  It's those inefficiencies that
make compression programs like zip possible.


> As a font encoding, it could make a lot of sense.
> But what if someone puts a
> trojan horse in a font, or a font rasterizer gets
> into an infinite loop?
The interpretor would have to be written with the
ability to bail itself out.  Although since the
technique does not allow looping, only an infinitely
long code word could result in an infinite loop.

I've also worked out a few more elaborations to the
system that would provide a lot more stylistic freedom
in creating glyphs, but I haven't written them up and
put them on my web page yet.

Thanks for the food for thought.

--gary

--gary