Boustrophedon and Chinese Re: A single font can display ANY alphabet, pictograph

Hi.

Some languages are written top-to-bottom or bottom-to-top, instead of
left-to-right or right-to-left.

Have you given any consideration to adapting any of your systems to
such languages?

My own first conlang (not yet suitable for public viewing) is going
to have a boustrophedon (sp?) script beginning at the lower right
corner of the page, proceeding upwards to the upper right corner,
then moving leftwards one line, and proceeding downwards to the
bottom of the page, then moving leftwards one more line, then
proceeding upwards to the top of the page, ... etc., ... until
finally the last line of the page is written (top-to-bottom if evenly
many lines, bottom-to-top if oddly many lines) along the left edge of
the page.

For my purposes, in this conlang's script, a character and its top-to-
bottom mirror-image, as well as a character and its left-to-right
mirror-image, will "have the same value" (i.e. mean the same thing.)

Could one of your tinkertoy-systems (or other systems) make that easy?

Thanks,

Tom H.C. in MI

--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Gary Shannon <fiziwig@Y...> wrote:
>
> Well, almost any.
>
> Returning to the list after an absence of a few
> months, to share an idea I've toyed with off and on
> for a couple of years: The idea that a single font
> could be designed that could be used to display and
> print a huge variety of alphabetic characters,
> syllabaries, pictographs, runes, petroglyphs,
> hieroglyphs, and squiggles.
>
> With such a "universal" font you could invent your own
> writing system for you conlang and would not need to
> create a font for it, because the "tinker toy font"
> would have all the pieces you'd need to display your
> unique writing system. PLUS, your web page, and other
> conlanger's web pages, could display any conlang
> writing system as long as the viewer had the single
> universal Tinker Toy font.
>
> This one single font could display Roman, Greek,
> Devanagari, Korean Hangul, etc. etc.
>
> The simplest version, for runes and crude pictographs
> and alphabets is this one:
> http://fiziwig.com/tinkerfont.html
>
> A more complex, maybe even TOO complex version that
> displays detailed characters is here:
> http://fiziwig.com/tinker.html
>
> I need to find a usable font making program so I can
> try out the simple version and get a feel for how it
> could be improved upon. Maybe the best solution lies
> somewhere between the two extremes in the above two
> links.
>
> --gary
>

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