Re: Piktok Re: Q's Re: A conlang idea rolling around in my head

--- David Peterson <ThatBlueCat@...> wrote:
> I like what I saw of Piktok--very elegant!   And it
> kind of leads me to my
> next question.   If you were to design a graphic
> language like this, is there an
> easy way to do it on the computer?   It seems like
> you'd either have to do it
> all by hand, or come up with a way to number/name
> each glyph on the computer,
> or go through and create an elaborate font/series of
> pictures before even
> knowing if they were going to be the final forms.
>
> That's it.   Thanks for the input!
>
> -David
>
About three or four years ago I wrote a computer
program to generate glyphs based on the scheme of
assembling pieces as shown on hte preliminary Piktok
site.  I let it continue running when I went to bed
and when I got up the next morning the program had
crashed because it had filled up my 40 gig hard drive
with glyph images.  Millions and millions and millions
of glyph images!

I changed the program to not draw the glyph bitmaps to
disk, but only to count the possibilities.  The number
was in the billions.  I can't think of any way to use
the computer for generating glyphs without being
utterly swamped in billions of glyphs, and, because of
the unimaginable volume, there's no way to filter them
out by hand and pick the good ones.

So short of programming in some kind of aesthetic
selection criteria I guess generating them by hand as
needed might be the best way.  Either that or I could
write a program that generated glyphs at random.  Then
when I needed a glyph I could run the program and have
it dispaly a page full of a few thousand glyphs and
just visually scan for one that seemed to fit with the
concept I'm trying to fit a glyph to.

I'll have to give it some further thought.

--gary