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In the good old days, computers worked using punch cards and paper tape with holes. This was of course better by definition.
Seriously though, when a file name is displayed in Windows Explorer nowadays, although it can now have more than nine plus three characters, this is largely pointless because
either only the first few characters can be displayed or the name takes up too much space. If instead each character were represented by a single vertical column of seven or eight pixels indicating the ASCII code in binary, much longer filenames would be clearly visible. It would also mean that entire novels could be displayed legibly on a single screen.
Dotsies
http://dotsies.org/
Baked: a (customizable) 1-pixel-wide script for text, implemented as a font. Has six unused codes—IDK why those weren't used for punctuations somehow [notexactly, Dec 18 2018, last modified Dec 19 2018]
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I thought it was eight plus three. Kind of reminds me of hacks on old 8 bit computers to display characters in 4*8 pixels, to give up to 80 columns. |
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The dot would make it less legible. |
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Yes, i got that. The trouble is that an ASCII full stop hasn't got a code which is an exact power of two, so it isn't a dot in binary.
Paper tape always looked to me like a series of ideograms in dot matrix form, and i think it could get recognised after a while as such. For instance, "THE" as capitals could be:
001
000
101
010
100
000
111
only as differently-coloured dots rather than actual characters, and you'd get to recognise word shapes such as "Recycle Bin" and so forth after a while. In fact, in the end, each word would be an ideogram in normal text too and it would be faster to read.
I'm working on a font right now. |
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I can see the use in this - you can copy the 1-pixel font to the clipboard, and then paste as Unformatted Text into Word or Notepad when you want to read it. |
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You could also use the magnifier, but after a while you'd get used to many of the shapes. There'd also be a horizontal line through any string of capitals.
Thanks for the Baudot font, [bigsleep]. It enabled me to print the whole of the Bible on one double-sided sheet of paper. At normal size, the first thirty-four chapters of Genesis fit on this screen. Even so, i think ASCII would be better. Doesn't Baudot use control characters for case shift? Also, you presumably can't replace "at", "and" and other characters with "@", "&" &c, so it seems a bit wasteful. |
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Braille is not systematic in the right way. The capital letter controversy would complicate it and the line representing case would be absent. It would be easier to recognise. I don't feel entirely comfortable with UTF8 as it's an eight-bit code and i'm not sure about using the extra pixel. The ASCII parity bit might help in reading because then you'd get an indication that you'd misread it, and UTF8 hasn't got that. |
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I-Ching hexagrams are satisfyingly binary in
nature, albeit grouped into groups of 8 at a time
(so even more satisfying, since they're naturally
8-bit in nature) If used as an alternative to
character-glyphs, since there's 64 of them, they
can be quite nicely mapped onto upper, lower-case
and a fair bit of numbers and punctuation to spare,
so much like ASCII in many ways. |
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They have been reserved to occupy unicode positions
4DC0 to 4DFF and I'm certain they will have been
written into most unicode fonts. |
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// hexagrams […] groups of 8 // |
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