Re: A Font for Pictographs

On Sat, 13 Dec 2008 10:51:36 -0800, Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...>
wrote:
>--- On Sat, 12/13/08, Jeffrey Jones <jsjonesmiami@...> wrote:
>
>> Nice idea! I tried it out. Unfortunately, IE6 has trouble displaying the
>> assembled pictures at the bottom: it looks like there's an extra shift to the
>> right with each character. However, the first 9bgB comes out OK except for
>> being cut off a little on the right. Firedfox had no trouble except for the cut
>> off. Opera completely refuses to use the font.
>>
>> Jeff
>
> That's interesting. I never thought to try it out with different browsers. I
> assumed that a font is a font. It works fine with MS Word.
I tried copying your examples to my test page. When I replaced the hyphens
with spaces or pluses, it looked OK. Apparently, IE does something nefarious
with hyphens.

>> 1. In addition to space - + and _, the following characters
>> advance:  ~ ( ) O } A J Z C B ? z /
>> I'm pretty sure that some aren't supposed to.
>>
>> 2. There seem to be several redundant characters, e.g. j = ih (= hi).
>
> I will have to double check each character.
I'm fairly sure of the ones I mentioned.

> My original idea was to have all lower case characters NOT advance the
> cursor, and all upper case one DO advance the cursor, so that four
> keystroke would suffice for a character. That didn't quite work out, however.
>
> Also, I think I need to adjust the advance characters, and maybe exchange
> hyphen for space bar, and adjust the other spacings so that space bar
> always puts the proper distance between pictographs.
>
> As for the redundant characters, I wanted to save on keystrokes, so I tried
> to provide "shortcuts" for more common shapes. For example, you can draw
> a diamond with four keystrokes (KLMN) or with a single keystroke (zero).
> The zero key is just the shortcut way to draw a diamond, so that character
> definitions would not get too long.
I figured that was the reason. I was thinking more of C c J j, which can be
duplicated with only two keystrokes each.

I don't have any other comments yet, except to say that I'd probably assign
some of the keys differently if I were doing it, for example avoiding < > " & as
basic keystrokes.

Jeff

Reply