h a l f b a k e r y"Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
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Write books only using the letters aceimnorsuvwxz - i.e. those without risers or descenders which will allow you to put the lines closer together, and save paper, and hence, the planet. Brief example follows:
...
sam, a vicious man, reviews museums and envies anne, a serious woman. sam seizes ann
"no reason, russia amazes me. i revere caviar". sam unnerves ann. “mmm, no music in a vacuum, no, even a remix...”. sam, now czar sam, mixes wine and ouzo. sam vexes ann. “i am a worm” vows sam, “a cancerous cow!”
...
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Annotation:
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//— hippo //
Gonna have to change that nick... |
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...don't you think the ellipsis are overdoing it? |
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an- no u--ercase -e--ers ei--er. |
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This doesn't just have to be for books - many items could be wrapped in less packaging if less space were required for the instructions. |
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Not to make too large a point of it, but don't you count the dot of the "i" as a "riser"? Or did you just decide to ignore it because the text would be so much more limited without its inclusion? I suppose the same could be said for the use of quotation marks (") and exclamation marks (!) which also prohibit the lines from being set a minimum distance apart. |
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You'd have to use << >> as quotation marks. Weren't those invented by Envire Emmenthal Yves Rondli? |
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I've just tried to write my anno accordingly and found it very difficult, which may depend on getting used to it. You could use one of the two Turkish i's, which omits the dot. One problem, i think, is that it would make it wordier. I wonder if you could just base an entire conlang on the shortened alphabet. The other thing which occurs is Iain Banks's Marain, which uses a binary grid of three by three to represent two to the ninth possible phonemes. Extend this to syllables and use a CV syllable structure with eight vowels and you can still have sixty-four consonants, representing single-syllable words with a character each, and it could be pretty dense, still with no descenders or ascenders. |
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Another approach, which would allow you to use risers and descenders, would be to find words which fit perfectly into the interstices, for example, the words |
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can be scrunched into each other with no overlap (the top of the t goes inside the n, the d's fit between the p's, and the y's nest together). Finding arrangements of words on consecutive lines which have maximum squishability is a job for a powerful computer. |
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As a Belgian, I cannot stand the idea that entire books will be written without mentioning Belgians, Belgium, Belgicism, Brelgum or Belgitude. Just to save the blanet. |
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[jurist] I know, I know - I agonised over whether I was allowed to use the letter "i"
[phundug] Yes, << >> would be better. And I like the idea of choosing words according to how well they fit into the descenders of the line above. One can imagine an entire plot shifting direction because the word "love" fits better than the word "hate" in a particular place. |
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It occurred to me that writing in the past tense also extends words with
the ending "ed" added on to everything. Writing in the present tense
will make it shorter. Example: |
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He handed him the telephone and asked him to make the call. |
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He hands him the telephone and asks him to make the call. |
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That's two less letters. A huge improvement. |
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-- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. . / .- -. -.-- --- -. . ..--.. / .--- ..- ... - / -- .- -.- . ... / - .... . / ... .. --. -. ... / ...- . .-. -.-- / - .. -. -.-- .-.-.- |
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Just leave out all the risers and descenders altogether. |
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e ane im e eeone an ase im o ae e ca. |
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You could use a really, really, really small font, and have people at home use some sort of microfiche style machine to assist in reading the books. Those without the dexterity to use tweezers might be able to train fleas or microbes to turn the pages on command. |
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How about decomposing each letter into three parts (the top section, the x-height section, and the descending section) and then printing all three right on top of each other (all in the x-height area)? This is done in three different colors; the reader uses different color filters to extract each part of the letter and mentally visualizes the whole letter. |
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Bun for a laugh, although it seems communist. |
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