Re: A Pictographic system that makes fonts obsolete

> If we start with the assumption that the average
> English word is five letters long plus a space that
> means that it takes 6 bytes, or 48 bits to store the
> average English word in a text document.  When a
> Piktok document is stored on disc it would be stored
> as a series of codes, possibly 16-bit or even 24-bit,
> allowing for 65,536 or 16,777,216 words respectively.
> The word processor software would contain the
> dictionary that would translate from the arbitrary
> code (say "2476") to the glyph definition (say
> "CHmQV:GI:PvWxSM*").
>
> Using 16 bits per Piktok word as compared to 48 bits
> per English word would mean that a Piktok document
> would occupy 1/3 as much disk space as the equivalent
> English document.
What you describe here is precisely the way font works. What you call a
dictionary is exactly a font. Something which associate the caracter
number with information on how to represent it. Uusaly, font have two
types of format. they can bit store as bitmap ( discribing each letter
pixel by pixel), or vectorial ( saying "straight line from point x=1,y=3
to x=4,y=6; curve from ......). but basicly, the idea is to have a
association between caracter number, and it's description.

Isn't that exactly what your dictionary is doing? except that the way
you discribe each character by a different method. You did not propose a
system independent from fonts, but a new format of fonts.

And at the same time, your idea imply that you'll have to setup a new
pagecode. that is, set up a convention saying which number represent
which character.

After all, why do you think fonts are not appropriate for
ideographic/pictographic writing systems?

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