[HN Gopher] Boustrophedon
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Boustrophedon
Author : slondr
Score : 44 points
Date : 2023-04-22 15:20 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| kjhughes wrote:
| See also _ambigram_ , coined by Douglas Hofstadter, which is a
| word or phrase that also makes sense after a transformation,
| commonly a point rotation of 180deg:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambigram
|
| Word ambigrams make fun logos.
| tomcam wrote:
| Fun but arguably seldom readable, methinks?
| mav88 wrote:
| First came across this word in Godel, Escher, Bach.
| lonelygirl15a wrote:
| Many dot matrix printers were boustrophedonic.
|
| Also how I mow my lawn.
| FriedPickles wrote:
| Why not inkjets too?
| tomcam wrote:
| Because mowing your lawn with inkjets just doesn't work well
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| Because they adopted the "Gillette business model".
| dahart wrote:
| They are, typically
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Boustrophedon_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15539373
| - Oct 2017 (59 comments)
|
| _Boustrophedon Order_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1547209 - July 2010 (12
| comments)
| zamadatix wrote:
| Presumably triggered by this conversation
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35651252 which is my hint
| to get off HN for the weekend :).
| pphysch wrote:
| I would guess that most written languages started out this way
| (not enough space for my line? Impossible!), before people
| realized it didn't scale well for larger documents
| gnicholas wrote:
| A related technique, aiming to solve the same problem, is the
| BeeLine method for displaying text with line-wrapping color
| gradients. [1] Unlike with Boustrophedon, the return sweep
| (visual motion from right to left) is not eliminated, but it is
| assisted by colored text that flagposts where the next line is.
|
| Disclosure: I came up with the BeeLine method, which was first
| popularized on Hacker News. [2]
|
| 1: http://www.beelinereader.com
|
| 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| Chemists still write in this way when writing mechanisms. Here's
| a typical example:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_mechanism#/media/File...
| arxpoetica wrote:
| Philo Farnsworth, an early television Pioneer, drew from this
| idea.
|
| > A farm boy, his inspiration for scanning an image as a series
| of lines came from the back-and-forth motion used to plow a
| field.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Philo_Farnsworth
| dahart wrote:
| I recently did a graphics experiment with volume rendering where
| I wanted to partition a grid into groups of active voxels.
| Imagining a Morton or Hilbert curve would be best, I compared it
| to row-major/scanline order and Boutrophedonic, as maybe a couple
| different baselines. I was very surprised to find that
| Boustrophedonic was the best of these in terms of minimizing
| volume and overlap of the groups. I was packing naively and not
| being careful to use powers of two, which definitely compromised
| the usage of Morton and Hilbert, so my result isn't necessarily
| the best or generally applicable, but it was still surprising and
| interesting to me and some others people I discussed with, that
| doing it the dumb way lead to back-and-forth ordering being
| better than space filling curves with what seem to be more
| apparent locality properties. (Well, it wasn't as surprising to
| the guy who suggested I should try a Boustrophedonic ordering.
| Maybe he experienced the same surprise earlier.)
| eeks wrote:
| I find rongorongo a lot easier to read [1]. I wish kindle would
| support that layout mode, I could easily double my reading speed.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo
| jutrewag wrote:
| Rongorongo hasn't been deciphered. Secondly, it goes LTR and
| RTL alternatively but also inverts the alphabets upside down.
| There really shouldn't be a reason that that would be faster
| and easier to read.
| pengaru wrote:
| This makes me disappointed that english letters aren't all
| horizontally symmetric so you'd just be alternating the order of
| the letters within words line to line, but still writing/reading
| the same letter forms.
|
| Is there an established horizontally symmetric english alphabet
| derivative people use for creative purposes?
| tlb wrote:
| Not what you're asking, but tr a-z A-Z
| </usr/share/dict/words | grep '^[AHIMOTUVWXY]*$'
|
| gets you a subset of English. You can say things like AHOY
| OTTAWA AUTOMATA! YUMMY HAM: MOUTH VOMIT. MAXIMUM YOUTH.
| jshprentz wrote:
| I first encountered this word in troff documentation back in the
| 1980s. Two examples:
|
| A Typesetter-independent TROFF by Brian W. Kernighan, 1982.
| https://www.hack.org/mc/texts/ditroff-kernighan.ps.gz
|
| Using nroff and troff on the Sun Workstation, 1986.
| http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/sun/sunos/3.0/800-1321-03A_Usin...
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(page generated 2023-04-22 23:01 UTC)