In non-phoenitic languages, i.e. English, many of these methods are painful, especially "Last is First". See "I", but then it's "In", so you need to mentally backtrack some understanding. See "t", but then it's "that", so if you're subvocalizing to read, you need to reform the phoneme because 't' is a different phoneme from 'th'.
demetrius · 5h ago
I think "Same Sizer" looks ugly because characters are stretched mechanically, so each line has different width. Ideally, the lines should all keep their widths, and the position should be stretched.
I think a better application of "all words have the same size" principle can be seen in Vietnamese calligraphy, which sometimes combines Latin characters with Chinese-adjacent writing style, e.g. https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%C4%90%E1%BB%91i_-... (this is written in Latin script split into equal squares)
eddythompson80 · 5h ago
Ok, I want the "Hyphenator" layout, but with more than just one word. I want the extra text to wrap around while the font keeps getting smaller to mimic how I used to take hand notes in college and need to shove in some stuff with no space left in the line.
cjcenizal · 2h ago
Every once in a while I come across something so beautifully stupid that all I can see is the genius behind it, and it fills me with joy. Well done!
n3storm · 19m ago
Did you try to read it aloud? Your voice instantly becomes robotic :D
"Last is first" very much reminds me of the custos/custodes seen often in Gregorian chant notation, which come at the end of a line and are a hint of the first note in the next line (so while your eye is finding the start of the next line, you already know the pitch, even though it typically does not include the syllable).
in devnagri script text is aligned at the top of the line instead of the bottom of the line. e.g. https://www.typotheque.com/research/devanagari-the-makings-o.... would be cool to see a version where roman scripts are top-aligned, bottom uneven instead of the other way round
Groxx · 2h ago
"Same Sizer" is exactly how I feel about justified text
gtr32x · 6h ago
Author made frequent reference to Hebrew text, is there a particular reason historical Hebrew texts uses these methods?
elchananHaas · 4h ago
Yes. A combination of being hand copied and the text having no punctuation.
Fellshard · 4h ago
Could it also be an artifact of using scrolls, and needing to sharply delimit 'pages' of text?
rhet0rica · 4h ago
No. Both Torah scrolls and ancient Greco-Roman papyrus scrolls are written sideways, in columns of a consistent width. The rollers are held in the hands.
Modern fantasy depictions of vertical scrolls leave an erroneous impression that the book proceeds in a downward direction, in addition to the cliché use of 'see above' to prefer to anything previously in the text. Hypertext media and text editors further support this misunderstanding by applying continuous scrolling to a document. This confusion is quite new, perhaps as recent as the 1980s.
echelon · 4h ago
These are so creative!
I love "Same Sizer" for titles and design, and I don't think I'd hate "Fill the Space" in body text if glyphs (such as the key) were used.
mbaytas · 5h ago
immediately ordered the book
fascinating checkout flow
vsviridov · 6h ago
Thanks, I hate it. /s
Reminds me of the Dotsies system for fast reading, only this makes reading slow...
I think a better application of "all words have the same size" principle can be seen in Vietnamese calligraphy, which sometimes combines Latin characters with Chinese-adjacent writing style, e.g. https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%C4%90%E1%BB%91i_-... (this is written in Latin script split into equal squares)
https://alternativelayoutsystem.com/imager/
See e.g. https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.18/Documentation/notation/ancien...
in devnagri script text is aligned at the top of the line instead of the bottom of the line. e.g. https://www.typotheque.com/research/devanagari-the-makings-o.... would be cool to see a version where roman scripts are top-aligned, bottom uneven instead of the other way round
Modern fantasy depictions of vertical scrolls leave an erroneous impression that the book proceeds in a downward direction, in addition to the cliché use of 'see above' to prefer to anything previously in the text. Hypertext media and text editors further support this misunderstanding by applying continuous scrolling to a document. This confusion is quite new, perhaps as recent as the 1980s.
I love "Same Sizer" for titles and design, and I don't think I'd hate "Fill the Space" in body text if glyphs (such as the key) were used.
fascinating checkout flow
Reminds me of the Dotsies system for fast reading, only this makes reading slow...