Re: A Pictographic system that makes fonts obsolete

Surely it wouldn't make fonts obsolete.  Are you propsing this as a font encoding,
or as a text encoding? It would not be very efficient as a text encoding.  The
reason is that written language uses very few of the symbols allowed in its
graphical inventory.  The uppercase greek letters, for example, would not look out
of place if we added them to the latin alphabet.  If we made an encoding format
like your proposal that is suitable for producing English, it would probably also be
able to produce the uppercase Greek alphabet as well.

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.

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?

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