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on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Alternative Layout System
monster_truck wrote 4 hours 5 min ago:
It's giving time cube
tangus wrote 6 hours 47 min ago:
Related to "Last is first", old Spanish books sometimes put at the end
of the page the first syllable of the next page. (It was quite
disconcerting when I first saw it.)
jfengel wrote 40 min ago:
It was common throughout Europe in the early modern era.
I've got a book of recipes from Williamsburg, Virginia, a kind of
outdoor museum LARPing as 1775. The recipes are from various sources,
but they typeset it as a period document, including those catchwords.
I find it charming.
duskwuff wrote 4 hours 56 min ago:
That's called a "catchword", and it's common in many older texts (not
just in Spanish). It serves two purposes - it makes it easier for a
person reading the book aloud to read smoothly while turning a page,
and it makes it easier for bookbinders to spot pages which are
missing or out of order. (Page numbers were, believe it or not, a
later development.)
rswail wrote 10 hours 53 min ago:
I think "Last Is First" is almost like a checksum for the people
writing the text, so they don't lose their place as they are copying
it.
I remember having to read the Torah and it was hard to move from
learning to read with standard printed Hebrew, into not only the
voweless text, but with the letters stretched. You had to learn how to
sing the words correctly as well.
But it was a beautiful thing to see, handwritten, fully justified,
columns written with ink on parchment.
smm32 wrote 11 hours 42 min ago:
God, please don't make websites like this. I have a 1 Gbps connection,
with a 1 Gbps network interface. Your server _cannot_ serve a site this
large. Every single jpeg image which by design takes up no more than a
few hundred pixels on a side when rendered on a screen is transferred
over in 4K resolution, at sizes up to 9 MiB. Certain pages take upwards
of 15 seconds to load with a total size of >40 MiB!!! I'm aware that
it's partially due to the hug of death, but 3 Mbps is actually a
respectable serving speed for most small servers, the site itself is
just too large!
eddd-ddde wrote 9 hours 43 min ago:
I was so confused by there was no link to see the layouts. Turns out
they were loading! It took like 3mins> on my network to even show the
first one!
jrajav wrote 11 hours 7 min ago:
This is one of the cases where it seems more justified than usual.
This is not a website intended for end users, maximizing for
performance and conversion rate. It's a design showcase by a
typographer, for typographers. Every pixel is crucial, and the
intended audience would rather wait a few seconds to be able to
scrutinize the output with the required detail.
lifefeed wrote 11 hours 57 min ago:
I'd like to see a layout system that maximizes rivers in the text. Lets
make reading weird.
rsanek wrote 15 hours 8 min ago:
fun read. a few years ago i got pretty obsessed with boustrophedon
script, which feels to me in a similar category. still feels like such
an elegant solution to 'oh these lines are getting too long'.
URI [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon
Chris2048 wrote 14 hours 12 min ago:
I find this: [1] surprisingly easy to read; although obviously I
already know a lot of what's coming, I can still pick up on the
working I'm unsure of. That said, words like "debts" still threw me
b/c of the 'd' looking like a 'b' and vice-versa.
I wonder if typesetting like this can be combined with [2] ?
The above emphesises text is a regular way, but I reckon you could
train an AI on people reading different empesised text, and track
where they slow-down or mis-speak; and as such figure out how a
different emphesis could improve comprehension (of the text)?
URI [1]: https://i0.wp.com/biblequestions.info/wp-content/uploads/202...
URI [2]: https://bionic-reading.com/
donatj wrote 16 hours 34 min ago:
I have some eye issues, namely a lazy eye and double vision. I find
same-sizer remarkably easy to read. Easier than standard text, which is
very curious.
I almost wonder if the idea could be used as a sort of accessibility
mode.
JoBrad wrote 14 hours 30 min ago:
Other than a very slight astigmatism, I have no visuals issues, but
also found the same-sizer text much easier to read than I thought it
would be.
Igrom wrote 16 hours 40 min ago:
Of course it's Swiss.
NackerHughes wrote 19 hours 3 min ago:
I want to like this, but the page keeps reloading itself every few
seconds. Itâs really annoying.
b0a04gl wrote 19 hours 18 min ago:
these layouts break kerning rules. render engines expect horizontal
flow, steady spacing. but with same sizer or echoed lines, glyph logic
goes off path. spacing's no longer font native, it's forced by layout.
font stops being just visual, becomes part of layout logic. whole
engine ends up doing things it wasn't ment for. then layout will start
mutates typography logic iteslf
smm32 wrote 11 hours 40 min ago:
that's kind of the point here, i guess. to intentionally find nice
ways of breaking rules to achieve some neat effects, to look into
what can be done. it's a really neat thing to do.
fsiefken wrote 20 hours 45 min ago:
I make it more readable I want to squash the words further so the
english becomes more logographic by:
A) using an alphabetic shorthand ike superwrite: [1] B) squeeze the
individual letters together in a font, extreme negative tracking while
they're still distinguishable.
C) substitute frequent short words with symbols and prefix them to the
next word, e.g.:
- 'not' with symbol: "!"
- 'and' with symbol: "&'
- 'or' with symbol: "|"
- 'the' with symbol: "`"
- 'a' with symbol: "*"
- 'at' with symbol: "@"
- 'about/around/circa' with symbol "~"
- 'of' with symbol '\'
- 'for/per' with symbol '%'
- 'in' with symbol '#'
- 'to' with symbol '>'
- 'from' with symbol '<'
- 'on' with symbol '^'
- 'as' with symbol '-'
- 'is' with symbol '='
- 'with' with symbols 'w/' & 'w/o' (without)
...
URI [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/shorthand/comments/pttlnn/superwrite_...
Nevermark wrote 21 hours 33 min ago:
This applied to a fictionally motivated glyphs, like Klingon, would be
interesting.
nick238 wrote 21 hours 48 min ago:
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'.
pmontra wrote 7 hours 35 min ago:
A short word like "that" is read at once, especially because it's
common. So no need to backtrack.
A less common word like "phoenitic" or "subvocalizing" is read as you
say. However by the end of the sentence we know how to read "phoneme"
because we encountered it 3 times in one form or the other.
taeric wrote 10 hours 16 min ago:
English is phonetic? The writing systems aren't regular in that the
same letter can represent different sounds. But they still represent
sounds. Indeed, your confusion wouldn't even be possible if they
didn't represent sounds.
pfortuny wrote 19 hours 7 min ago:
Just trying to help:
"i.e." stands for "id est", which means "that is".
In your text, you should rather say "e.g." (exempli gratia), which
means "for instance", "for example".
mkaic wrote 8 hours 48 min ago:
I think in casual speech at this point (at least in my experience)
the two are used interchangeably. In professional or legal settings
I'm sure the distinction matters more, but I feel like OP's usage
here felt pretty natural to me even though it's not technically
correct.
bee_rider wrote 48 min ago:
Better to get corrected in an informal setting, than to use it
wrong on a formal one.
jjmarr wrote 4 hours 33 min ago:
The distinction matters because i.e. implies English is the only
non-phonetic language in existence.
lelanthran wrote 5 hours 54 min ago:
> I think in casual speech at this point (at least in my
experience) the two are used interchangeably.
How?
They don't mean the same thing.
kevin_thibedeau wrote 6 hours 28 min ago:
They aren't interchangeable. "i.e." is equivalent to "in other
words". "e.g." is "for example".
pfortuny wrote 8 hours 6 min ago:
Well, the thing is⦠when you use a borrowed term from a dead
language, in writing, it really sounds wrong to cultivated ears.
I really had to double-check that sentence to see if I had parsed
it wrongly. Not bragging, just saying.
They cannot be completely interchangeable:
âThere are white people among us: i.e. me and my fatherâ is
totally different from ââ¦: e.g. me and my fatherâ.
dxdm wrote 19 hours 32 min ago:
Isn't reading more like pattern recognition than parsing
letter-for-letter? It seems to work like that for me. There's also
the somewhat famous text where each word's letters are jumbled and
people can still read it fluently. Maybe that's not the case for
everyone, though, and people have different ways of making sense of
written text.
Edit: Quick search turned up this article about the jumbled-word
phenomenon, containing the example text at the top:
URI [1]: https://observer.com/2017/03/chunking-typoglycemia-brain-con...
speerer wrote 19 hours 22 min ago:
I once attended a short workshop where the person presenting
encouraged us to switch between two modes of reading away from
sub-vocalizing and into pattern recognition. The result was much
faster reading without loss of understanding.
He didn't use those terms but adopting them from this thread - I
learned that day that these really are two distinct modes.
Groxx wrote 1 day ago:
"Same Sizer" is exactly how I feel about justified text
cjcenizal wrote 1 day 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 wrote 21 hours 59 min ago:
Did you try to read it aloud? Your voice instantly becomes robotic :D
cjcenizal wrote 10 hours 32 min ago:
Hahaha, actually I think I heard it in Jony Ivesâs voice.
philsnow wrote 1 day ago:
"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).
See e.g.
URI [1]: https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.18/Documentation/notation/ancient-...
shreyarajpal wrote 1 day ago:
so cool!
in devnagri script text is aligned at the top of the line instead of
the bottom of the line. e.g. [1] . would be cool to see a version where
roman scripts are top-aligned, bottom uneven instead of the other way
round
URI [1]: https://www.typotheque.com/research/devanagari-the-makings-of-...
alberth wrote 1 day ago:
Or just use CSS
text-wrap: balance
URI [1]: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/css-ui/css-text-wrap-balance
junon wrote 20 hours 21 min ago:
This is a set of InDesign scripts. Not CSS.
echelon wrote 1 day 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.
eddythompson80 wrote 1 day 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.
demetrius wrote 1 day 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. [1]
(this is written in Latin script split into equal squares)
URI [1]: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%C4%90%E1%BB%91i_-_T...
gwern wrote 4 hours 37 min ago:
FWIW, I call this approach 'square' writing, and have compiled some
links at [1] Probably the most interesting one is the 'Hangulatin'
font ( [2] ), which is exactly what it sounds like, and unfortunately
has been abandoned/linkrotten but you can see a lot of it in the old
video:
URI [1]: https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/square/index
URI [2]: https://www.t26.com/fonts/22320-Hangulatin-EN
URI [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0syCsC0_4s
bradrn wrote 12 hours 38 min ago:
Along similar lines, the calligraphy here is quite impressive:
URI [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/language/comments/1gmzro8/what_scri...
pavlov wrote 16 hours 35 min ago:
Huh. I would never have noticed that your example image is actually
in Latin script.
Because I don't read Chinese, anything that looks enough like Chinese
seems to mentally go into the bin of "I can't understand this
anyway." (I guess in this case it would help if I knew Vietnamese
because then I would recognize familiar words and syllables in this
calligraphy.)
Fascinating effect.
jjmarr wrote 4 hours 35 min ago:
I can read Chinese and still cannot process that image as Latin
script. They've turned every letter into a Chinese character
component. It makes my head hurt.
Scene_Cast2 wrote 8 hours 46 min ago:
I still can't read it despite trying.
demetrius wrote 6 hours 52 min ago:
The page below, in the âSummaryâ section, has a version in
normal font, starting with âTân niênâ
(Also, interestingly, there is a version in Chinese characters.
Looks like the whole phrase is a borrowing from Classical
Chinese? Probably the readers know the phrase as set expression,
so it's easier for them.)
yorwba wrote 15 hours 14 min ago:
It does not help that "hoa" is stylized as something resembling
ã®å£äº½.
floppyd wrote 19 hours 34 min ago:
I really wanted to see the example you linked, but the link is broken
demetrius wrote 10 hours 27 min ago:
I don't know why. It works for me.
As an alternative, you can go to Wikipedia and paste File:Äá»i -
Tết 2009.jpg into the search bar.
rapnie wrote 15 hours 46 min ago:
I had the problem that navigating the page in firefox almost set
fire to my CPU on my 2yr old linux dev laptop. Really liked the
visualisations, though.
bryanrasmussen wrote 9 hours 59 min ago:
navigating the page in firefox on my 2 year old Mac M1, with
about 50 tabs open and a few other applications running including
Krita, Chrome, VS Studio, The Terminal, Preview and a couple
finder windows gave no problems whatsoever, so maybe they should
look at it but not high priority.
mbaytas wrote 1 day ago:
immediately ordered the book
fascinating checkout flow
Gualdrapo wrote 1 day ago:
Their "imager" tool is really cool, though:
URI [1]: https://alternativelayoutsystem.com/imager/
vsviridov wrote 1 day ago:
Thanks, I hate it. /s
Reminds me of the Dotsies system for fast reading, only this makes
reading slow...
gtr32x wrote 1 day ago:
Author made frequent reference to Hebrew text, is there a particular
reason historical Hebrew texts uses these methods?
elchananHaas wrote 1 day ago:
Yes. A combination of being hand copied and the text having no
punctuation.
Fellshard wrote 1 day ago:
Could it also be an artifact of using scrolls, and needing to
sharply delimit 'pages' of text?
rhet0rica wrote 1 day 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.
JonathonW wrote 7 hours 59 min ago:
Scrolls written in a single column and "scrolled" vertically
(like a modern text editor or web browser) weren't completely
unheard of, particularly for liturgical or legal documents.
See [1] But, yeah, the horizontal format would've been more
common.
URI [1]: http://grbs.library.duke.edu/article/viewFile/9191/460...
RattlesnakeJake wrote 1 day ago:
This is horrendous. I love it.
DIR <- back to front page