[HN Gopher] Alternative Layout System
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Alternative Layout System
Author : smartmic
Score : 353 points
Date : 2025-06-26 19:31 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (alternativelayoutsystem.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (alternativelayoutsystem.com)
| RattlesnakeJake wrote:
| This is horrendous. I love it.
| gtr32x wrote:
| Author made frequent reference to Hebrew text, is there a
| particular reason historical Hebrew texts uses these methods?
| elchananHaas wrote:
| Yes. A combination of being hand copied and the text having no
| punctuation.
| Fellshard wrote:
| Could it also be an artifact of using scrolls, and needing to
| sharply delimit 'pages' of text?
| rhet0rica wrote:
| 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 cliche 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:
| 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
| http://grbs.library.duke.edu/article/viewFile/9191/4607
|
| But, yeah, the horizontal format would've been more
| common.
| vsviridov wrote:
| Thanks, I hate it. /s
|
| Reminds me of the Dotsies system for fast reading, only this
| makes reading slow...
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| Their "imager" tool is really cool, though:
|
| https://alternativelayoutsystem.com/imager/
| mbaytas wrote:
| immediately ordered the book
|
| fascinating checkout flow
| demetrius wrote:
| 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)
| floppyd wrote:
| I really wanted to see the example you linked, but the link is
| broken
| rapnie wrote:
| 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:
| 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.
| demetrius wrote:
| I don't know why. It works for me.
|
| As an alternative, you can go to Wikipedia and paste File:Doi
| - Tet 2009.jpg into the search bar.
| pavlov wrote:
| 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.
| yorwba wrote:
| It does not help that "hoa" is stylized as something
| resembling noKou La .
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| I still can't read it despite trying.
| demetrius wrote:
| The page below, in the "Summary" section, has a version in
| normal font, starting with "Tan nien"
|
| (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.)
| jjmarr wrote:
| 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.
| bradrn wrote:
| Along similar lines, the calligraphy here is quite impressive:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/language/comments/1gmzro8/what_scri...
| gwern wrote:
| FWIW, I call this approach 'square' writing, and have compiled
| some links at
| https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/square/index
|
| Probably the most interesting one is the 'Hangulatin' font
| (https://www.t26.com/fonts/22320-Hangulatin-EN), 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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0syCsC0_4s
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| 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.
| echelon wrote:
| 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.
| alberth wrote:
| Or just use CSS text-wrap: balance
|
| https://developer.chrome.com/docs/css-ui/css-text-wrap-balan...
| junon wrote:
| This is a set of InDesign scripts. Not CSS.
| shreyarajpal wrote:
| so cool!
|
| 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
| philsnow wrote:
| "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.
| https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.18/Documentation/notation/ancien...
| cjcenizal wrote:
| 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:
| Did you try to read it aloud? Your voice instantly becomes
| robotic :D
| cjcenizal wrote:
| Hahaha, actually I think I heard it in Jony Ives's voice.
| Groxx wrote:
| "Same Sizer" is exactly how I feel about justified text
| nick238 wrote:
| 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'.
| dxdm wrote:
| 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:
| https://observer.com/2017/03/chunking-typoglycemia-brain-con...
| speerer wrote:
| 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.
| pfortuny wrote:
| 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:
| 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.
| pfortuny wrote:
| 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:
|
| "There are white people among us: i.e. me and my father" is
| totally different from "...: e.g. me and my father".
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| They aren't interchangeable. "i.e." is equivalent to "in
| other words". "e.g." is "for example".
| lelanthran wrote:
| > 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.
| jjmarr wrote:
| The distinction matters because i.e. implies English is the
| only non-phonetic language in existence.
| taeric wrote:
| 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.
| pmontra wrote:
| 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.
| Nevermark wrote:
| This applied to a fictionally motivated glyphs, like Klingon,
| would be interesting.
| fsiefken wrote:
| 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:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/shorthand/comments/pttlnn/superwrit...
|
| 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) ...
| b0a04gl wrote:
| 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:
| 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.
| NackerHughes wrote:
| I want to like this, but the page keeps reloading itself every
| few seconds. It's really annoying.
| Igrom wrote:
| Of course it's Swiss.
| donatj wrote:
| 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:
| 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.
| rsanek wrote:
| 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'. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon
| Chris2048 wrote:
| I find this: https://i0.wp.com/biblequestions.info/wp-
| content/uploads/202... 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
| https://bionic-reading.com/ ? 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)?
| lifefeed wrote:
| I'd like to see a layout system that maximizes rivers in the
| text. Lets make reading weird.
| smm32 wrote:
| 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!
| jrajav wrote:
| 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.
| eddd-ddde wrote:
| 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!
| rswail wrote:
| 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.
| tangus wrote:
| 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.)
| duskwuff wrote:
| 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.)
| monster_truck wrote:
| It's giving time cube
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