To be fair, you could use your exact post to argue in favor of Juicero, uBeam or Theranos.
More in-depth, yes, a lot of posts here are criticizing - but it seems to me, a lot of it is constructive criticism from someone who actually did find the idea interesting.
I personally would find a HN where each post is just a variant of "woah that's super cool!" a lot less interesting.
The website states “was created thousands of years ago, and is optimized for writing, not reading. About time for an update, no? Dotsies is optimized for reading.”, and other claims on the website, and people are not instantly convinced just because it’s free.
Positivity is fine, but blind positivity is not helpful for anyone..
I feel like HN should implement a "positive-only" or "constructive-only" flag for posts, whether set by posters or moderators. Perhaps all Show HN. Start to experiment, see what sticks.
I believe it was an HN thread years ago where I first discovered Dotsies. I spent a very satisfying afternoon learning to read it and write it. I then labelled all sorts of cables and patch boards and such with it around my cubicle for fun. I only kept them up for a few days, but it was a blast learning to read something cryptic and cool looking at a glance with so little effort. If only for that idle distraction Dotsies is a worthy hack. I really think half the fun is in the teaching method.
It is fun. I actually used (and still use) the "Standard Galactic Alphabet" from the Commander Keen games every once in a while, which is a little easier to read and write, yet almost as baffling to non-insiders :)
Very interesting. It's definitely more compact but I would challenge the more readable claim.
If you think about how the human vision system is constructed (similar to convnets in deep learning), the brain uses a hierarchy of constructs like circles, lines, corners, etc. Recognizing letters requires the triggering of multiple layers of these constructs.
A dot, and another dot 1 pixel higher or lower is easy to get conflated. There's going to be a high degree of uncertainty. We have a hard enough time distinguishing '1' and 'l', and 'O' and '0'. This makes it so every letter takes on that trait. We usually must rely on context of the surrounding letters and words to fill in the missing information.
I think the concept of this idea is valid, but we need more than moving pixels up and down to distinguish letters. If instead a form existed that mixed various small primitive shapes it might work.
I'm not an expert on the vision system but I would think, sticking to at most 2 different locations instead of 5, and mixing in vertical lines, horizontal lines, diagonals, corners, and circles might be work exploring.
There's also color but lots of people are color blind.
> I'm not an expert on the vision system but I would think, sticking to at most 2 different locations instead of 5, and mixing in vertical lines, horizontal lines, diagonals, corners, and circles might be work exploring.
What you proposed here turns out very similar to the elements of Korean Characters.
As an East Asian who is native to Chinese Characters, two-dimensional symbols are always more appealing to me. I started
to learn English 25 years ago while Japanese 10, but I read Japanese much more faster than English even without any Kanji.
Also: compact representation doesn't lead to faster reading. This study [0] compares native readers of English and Chinese text; the latter being more information dense than the former on a per-pixel basis. As for reading speed? In words per minute, it's a wash: 380 vs. 390.
Yeah, the whole claim "latin letters were optimized to be written by hand" is completely bollocks. The letters are also subject to constraints that are based in reading just as you described.
Dotsies words look kind of like letters. They have lines, corners, loops, etc.
> There's going to be a high degree of uncertainty. A dot, and another dot 1 pixel higher or lower is easy to get conflated
I initially thought that would be a big issue as well. Turns out in practice it almost never comes up when reading paragraphs. For headings or words on signs that could be more of an issue.
Problems that I immediately see with the approach:
* No baseline or other orienting structure, so vertical shifts easily change meaning ("ab" turns to "bc"), same for rotations.
* No redundancy to allow for recognizing incomplete / garbled / damaged letters.
Both features are prominent in any machine-readable encoding (like bar codes or QR codes), and are relatively easy to find in any human script.
The idea behind making more compact visual representation of letters has merit. This particular implementation of it is impractical, though. It only looks acceptable on a demo page.
(While at it, I know two well-designed phonetic writing systems: Tengwar and Hangul. Neither is super compact, but both are easy to learn and read, because of the internal logic. Dotsies are way more arbitrary; they don't exploit any connections between letter or sounds they represent.)
There's also Shavian and Quikscript for English, which handle the language phonetically. I think it's a big miss for any new writing system to keep a language with 38 or so sounds limited to 26 letters. Not to mention other languages that might want to use it.
Why didn't the designer select dot positions based on letter frequency or letter pairing frequency in English? This could have yielded a font that would be more likely to make pretty geometric shapes. Even a simple improvement like vowels all having higher dot positions in the font, and consonants having lower positions, could be interesting. It seems that the dot positions are just based on letter position in the alphabet. There is probably a way to come up with dot positions that yield much nicer looking shapes.
My suspicion is that the way to improve legibility is to consider ways to make symbol images more robust to noise. In particular, if a symbol image were perturbed, would the context help you figure out what that symbol should be?
For each letter, we can build a histogram of contexts that letter occurs in for a sufficiently large corpus. An example is the letter "o", whose occurrences in the previous sentence have the following contexts: f_r (twice), t_g, c_n, _c, c_r.
Each letter's context histograms have some similarity with each other letter's. We want different letters that have similar contexts to have widely differing appearances, because if their appearances were similar, their contexts will be of less help to the reader in disambiguating. And letters with sufficiently different contexts may be allowed to be more similar in appearance (note e.g. the archaic long "s", which despite visual ſimilarity to "f" is easily distinguished from it by the different contexts it appears in).
Hit the "random" link a few times and you'll get an idea of the possible variations. In the Dotsies pattern, vowels are at the tops and bottoms of words. The variations can look grainy, chunky, loopy, checker-board-ish (you'll see what I mean if you try it). The version I picked is a balance that leans toward being sparse and loopy, and is one of the many variations that has an intuitive letter ordering. Here's a decent one, but with a crappy ordering.
Surprisingly, none of them jump out as significantly better than the others (the overly dense ones being exceptions).
[from another comment]
> I am pretty sceptical that an "optimized" alphabet glyph would be one dot for a b c d e, two adjacent dots for f g h i, etc.
There are other mappings that looked marginally better to me, but I deemed picking one with a nice ordering was worth doing. A and E happen to be the 1st and 3rd most common letters, which works out if you want to lean toward the sparse end. Also O (the 4th), A, and E all stick to the top and bottom edges of words, so if you want your words to tend to have holes in the middle they are a good fit. Getting a decent mapping for the commonest letters seems to be key, but by all means, try the above link and post an alternative that you think is better.
I love the way it teaches you, but the other comments are correct.
It doesn't really make sense to optimize for screen space like this.
However, the teaching style along with a symbol alphabet that IS trying to solve for better legibility (without necessarily any allegiance to dyslexic fonts), could be pretty interesting.
In middle school when bored once I made my own symbolic alphabet, I found it really is extremely easy to learn a new symbol set for language you already know, so, changing away from the traditional symbols isn't even that massive of an endeavor.
I think they did do an OK job with using screen space well, but at the cost of legibility to a degree. That said, the more I think on it, maybe the author did too. Sure, individual letters aren't as legible, but the point is almost more that words become single characters, more like Mandarin. If those characters are legible, than it doesn't matter that the individual letters are not. If you don't know a word, you're already going to be individually inspecting the letters. (of course, it will still be mildly more difficult with dotsies)
This was my favourite aspect of dotsies: that words began to have familiar shapes. I stopped needing to parse certain words because their shape was so unique and memorable.
At the same time it would be interesting to see it implemented based on letter frequency rather than order in the alphabet.
> It doesn't really make sense to optimize for screen space like this.
However, the teaching style along with a symbol alphabet that IS trying to solve for better legibility ...
Optimizing for legibility as opposed to screen space is a distinction that isn't very meaningful in practice. Because if words aren't legible enough, people increase the font size until they are. If something is extremely legible (like latin letters at a 40pt font size) people will naturally tend to decrease the size. So screen space and legibility are largely different labels for the same concept. With some wiggle room but not that much.
I like the idea of users being able to choose the font they prefer to read in. It's not very hard to do: you could configure your browser and your code editor and maybe Kindle and be able to read in the new font 90% of the time.
But Dotsies seems to be solving the wrong problem: using the fewest pixels. I think the right problem is being able to skim large amounts of text quickly, for which typical fonts are pretty good. You can find whether there are any numbers on a page, for instance, in well under a second.
I use it (well, OpenDyslexie) as my only font on desktop Firefox and it's been ok for me for a year or thereabouts. I did use it in iOS Pocket as well but they dropped it a while back.
I was going to post some comment about how the comments here were all overly negative for what was obviously just someone having fun. Then I read the comments in 2012.
Jesus Christ.
In any case, it's sad to me how when people on HN see someone having a bit of fun or messing around, their first instinct is to knock it down.
On a barely more productive note, I am pretty sceptical that an "optimized" alphabet glyph would be one dot for a b c d e, two adjacent dots for f g h i, etc. How likely is it that alphabetical order also happens to be the best dot pattern?
One advantage of regular letters compared to this is that it's pretty easy to tell that even a fairly mangled A is still an A; a word written in dotsies loses a lot of its legibility as soon as it's not displayed in fairly large pixels across a very clear background. Viewing things at an angle? While it moves by? On a dirty or wet piece of paper? Forget about it.
It's a super fun idea, though. I would 100% put this in the background, or even the foreground, of some future scifi scape.
Yeah, it's a telling point that when we're asked to read passages of Dotsies, the font's sized up least three times (36px to 42px)—and so at least nine times the screen area taken—compared to the base 13px size used in the "How much better is it?" example.
You're going to need damn good eyes to read Dotsies at anything like 13px, and I suspect even the sharp-eyed are going to misread a lot. Size Dotsies text up to the point that people of average vision can read it as reliably as a normal font at a reasonable size, and I don't think you're going to get much, if any, greater information density.
I'm reminded of Speedtalk, a language from Robert Heinlein's story "Gulf", which had every combination of phoneme and delivery (pitch, length, etc.) represent a word in the Basic English vocabulary. So, every spoken "word" in the language is actually a full sentence. But, it takes intense futuristic training just to be able to speak vaguely intelligibly in it, because all the normal imprecisions of speaking (much less speaking in a new language) take any tiny error from "You used 'record' as a noun, but with a long 'e' and the stress on the second syllable." to "You have a hovercraft, and it's full of what???"
Now imagine trying to follow speech in such a language if the speaker's out of breath, alarmed, surrounded by background noise, etc. Just not enough redundancy for reliable communication.
Not to mention recognizing individual letters. The difference between “a” and “b” in Latin alphabet is drastic. In dotsies you could only tell them apart if other letters near them give you relative height of the dots to some baseline.
Dotsies seem to make a tradeoff where they optimize for higher information density at the cost of much higher error rate (or requirement for precision and accuracy if you will). I also definitely see your point about font sizes. Basically it’s a valiant attempt at a reimagined alphabet but I don’t think it actually achieves higher info density in the real world.
“Designed to be represented either in binary or symbol-written form, Marain is also regarded as an aesthetically pleasing language by the Culture. The symbols of the Marain alphabet can be displayed in three-by-three grids of binary (yes/no, black/white) dots and thus correspond to nine-bit wide binary numbers.”
just use Chinese, it’s optimized for screen space (each character occupies a square, and has complex meaning of a word, and people read their shapes, rather than stroke by stroke )
To learn, read one word from the top paragraph and see if it "looks" like the bottom dotsies. Then gradually try to read the paragraph without looking at the next word.
I like your mapping just about as well as the Dotsies mapping. Slightly more speckled vs angular. I wish others who are finding fault with the mapping would go down this path as well. I think they would quickly realize that one mapping is (generally speaking) about as good as another, so you might as well pick one with a good order. That's why I created that page.
The problem I see there is you think there is only English.
While you may write "naïve" as "naive" and lose nothing, there are some other languages too and the advantage of Latin is that it's visual and Latin letters can be slightly changed to have something similar but different.
Do you think "Fußgängerübergänge" can be read as "Fussgangerubergange" or "zażółć" as "zazolc"? (German and Polish respectively)
While I do get your point, Germans specifically handle the lack of umlauts (e.g. in digital spaces that don't allow them) by simply substituting "ä" with "ae", "ö" with "oe" and "ü" with "ue". Similarly, "ß" can be replaced with "ss" without losing much readability at all.
I spent time learning it years ago. It was... useless. It’s just too small and not readable. But then chinese websites have very small fonts as well, so maybe I should have persisted. If I could watch someone reading fluently in dotsies that would really impress me.
This reminds me of the old "real programmers use binary" meme, and how I experimented with bitmap image files by typing text into them and looking at the resulting patterns.
I wonder if I'm the only one who would find it easier to read if it was just ASCII printed in binary instead of its own symbol-set. ASCII has some patterns which make it easy to memorise, and it's something a lot of developers have indeed memorised already. That would make a great "1337 hax0r" font.
...and why not go the whole hog and make it 8 bits, so you can encode all of Unicode (as UTF-8)...
If you want a quick and easy way to compress the visual space taken up by text then we have several existing examples to choose from.
The most trivial is omission of vowels, instead relying on context or vowel marks (or some combination). Wrds r srprsngl lgbl wtht vwls. Anotherisomissionofspaces.
Lots of western (and other) scripts have been written these ways in the past. Neither can be said to have evolved to make text easier to write! Including the vowels is more difficult to write and both are more costly because they take up more space, which means larger tablets or more animal skin and ink required.
We settled on including vowels and word spacing to make text more legible, so I'm not sure where the author's claim about latin working the way it does to benefit writing comes from. If the OP wants to claim letters like b/d/p/q, m/n, w/v/u, etc are to the benefit of writers OK but "dotsies" is even worse in lacking distinct shapes.
Humans like symmetry and patterns so it seems far more likely some letters are variations on a pattern or mirror images because it is visually pleasing or easy to stamp new letters out of existing known shapes. If you think about it a/b/c/d/e/g/o/p/q are arguably variations on the same pattern, with g -> j, and j -> i following.
[+] [-] stavros|7 years ago|reply
> This is useless.
Who cares? It's super cool!
> This is not well-suited for use case X.
Did you read the page? It's so great that someone thought of this and did it.
> This has been done before.
SUPER. COOL.
> It's hard to read.
I don't know what you aren't getting about this.
> What if it implemented improvement X?
I don't know, I didn't write it. Maybe the author would appreciate the suggestion!
[+] [-] xg15|7 years ago|reply
More in-depth, yes, a lot of posts here are criticizing - but it seems to me, a lot of it is constructive criticism from someone who actually did find the idea interesting.
I personally would find a HN where each post is just a variant of "woah that's super cool!" a lot less interesting.
[+] [-] Klover|7 years ago|reply
Positivity is fine, but blind positivity is not helpful for anyone..
[+] [-] jeremyw|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duck|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] code_duck|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Procrastes|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shdon|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bcheung|7 years ago|reply
If you think about how the human vision system is constructed (similar to convnets in deep learning), the brain uses a hierarchy of constructs like circles, lines, corners, etc. Recognizing letters requires the triggering of multiple layers of these constructs.
A dot, and another dot 1 pixel higher or lower is easy to get conflated. There's going to be a high degree of uncertainty. We have a hard enough time distinguishing '1' and 'l', and 'O' and '0'. This makes it so every letter takes on that trait. We usually must rely on context of the surrounding letters and words to fill in the missing information.
I think the concept of this idea is valid, but we need more than moving pixels up and down to distinguish letters. If instead a form existed that mixed various small primitive shapes it might work.
I'm not an expert on the vision system but I would think, sticking to at most 2 different locations instead of 5, and mixing in vertical lines, horizontal lines, diagonals, corners, and circles might be work exploring.
There's also color but lots of people are color blind.
[+] [-] qlk1123|7 years ago|reply
What you proposed here turns out very similar to the elements of Korean Characters.
As an East Asian who is native to Chinese Characters, two-dimensional symbols are always more appealing to me. I started to learn English 25 years ago while Japanese 10, but I read Japanese much more faster than English even without any Kanji.
[+] [-] zamfi|7 years ago|reply
[0]: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/BF03204913.pdf
[+] [-] theon144|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trogdoro|7 years ago|reply
> There's going to be a high degree of uncertainty. A dot, and another dot 1 pixel higher or lower is easy to get conflated
I initially thought that would be a big issue as well. Turns out in practice it almost never comes up when reading paragraphs. For headings or words on signs that could be more of an issue.
[+] [-] punnerud|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nine_k|7 years ago|reply
* No baseline or other orienting structure, so vertical shifts easily change meaning ("ab" turns to "bc"), same for rotations.
* No redundancy to allow for recognizing incomplete / garbled / damaged letters.
Both features are prominent in any machine-readable encoding (like bar codes or QR codes), and are relatively easy to find in any human script.
The idea behind making more compact visual representation of letters has merit. This particular implementation of it is impractical, though. It only looks acceptable on a demo page.
(While at it, I know two well-designed phonetic writing systems: Tengwar and Hangul. Neither is super compact, but both are easy to learn and read, because of the internal logic. Dotsies are way more arbitrary; they don't exploit any connections between letter or sounds they represent.)
[+] [-] beizhia|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paxys|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] airesearcher|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpfed|7 years ago|reply
For each letter, we can build a histogram of contexts that letter occurs in for a sufficiently large corpus. An example is the letter "o", whose occurrences in the previous sentence have the following contexts: f_r (twice), t_g, c_n, _c, c_r.
Each letter's context histograms have some similarity with each other letter's. We want different letters that have similar contexts to have widely differing appearances, because if their appearances were similar, their contexts will be of less help to the reader in disambiguating. And letters with sufficiently different contexts may be allowed to be more similar in appearance (note e.g. the archaic long "s", which despite visual ſimilarity to "f" is easily distinguished from it by the different contexts it appears in).
[+] [-] trogdoro|7 years ago|reply
Try it yourself!
http://dotsies.org/design-your-own
Hit the "random" link a few times and you'll get an idea of the possible variations. In the Dotsies pattern, vowels are at the tops and bottoms of words. The variations can look grainy, chunky, loopy, checker-board-ish (you'll see what I mean if you try it). The version I picked is a balance that leans toward being sparse and loopy, and is one of the many variations that has an intuitive letter ordering. Here's a decent one, but with a crappy ordering.
http://dotsies.org/design-your-own/#comeyhangrxdtwqpsfubzljv...
Surprisingly, none of them jump out as significantly better than the others (the overly dense ones being exceptions).
[from another comment] > I am pretty sceptical that an "optimized" alphabet glyph would be one dot for a b c d e, two adjacent dots for f g h i, etc.
There are other mappings that looked marginally better to me, but I deemed picking one with a nice ordering was worth doing. A and E happen to be the 1st and 3rd most common letters, which works out if you want to lean toward the sparse end. Also O (the 4th), A, and E all stick to the top and bottom edges of words, so if you want your words to tend to have holes in the middle they are a good fit. Getting a decent mapping for the commonest letters seems to be key, but by all means, try the above link and post an alternative that you think is better.
[+] [-] Kiro|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vokep|7 years ago|reply
It doesn't really make sense to optimize for screen space like this.
However, the teaching style along with a symbol alphabet that IS trying to solve for better legibility (without necessarily any allegiance to dyslexic fonts), could be pretty interesting.
In middle school when bored once I made my own symbolic alphabet, I found it really is extremely easy to learn a new symbol set for language you already know, so, changing away from the traditional symbols isn't even that massive of an endeavor.
I think they did do an OK job with using screen space well, but at the cost of legibility to a degree. That said, the more I think on it, maybe the author did too. Sure, individual letters aren't as legible, but the point is almost more that words become single characters, more like Mandarin. If those characters are legible, than it doesn't matter that the individual letters are not. If you don't know a word, you're already going to be individually inspecting the letters. (of course, it will still be mildly more difficult with dotsies)
[+] [-] retreatguru|7 years ago|reply
At the same time it would be interesting to see it implemented based on letter frequency rather than order in the alphabet.
It was great fun to read!
[+] [-] trogdoro|7 years ago|reply
Optimizing for legibility as opposed to screen space is a distinction that isn't very meaningful in practice. Because if words aren't legible enough, people increase the font size until they are. If something is extremely legible (like latin letters at a 40pt font size) people will naturally tend to decrease the size. So screen space and legibility are largely different labels for the same concept. With some wiggle room but not that much.
[+] [-] tlb|7 years ago|reply
Can anyone who uses https://www.dyslexiefont.com/ comment on how hard it is to have it everywhere?
But Dotsies seems to be solving the wrong problem: using the fewest pixels. I think the right problem is being able to skim large amounts of text quickly, for which typical fonts are pretty good. You can find whether there are any numbers on a page, for instance, in well under a second.
[+] [-] zimpenfish|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] merricksb|7 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14825571 (2017, 22 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3601687 (2012, 98 comments)
[+] [-] johnfn|7 years ago|reply
Jesus Christ.
In any case, it's sad to me how when people on HN see someone having a bit of fun or messing around, their first instinct is to knock it down.
[+] [-] david_ar|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tedunangst|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roryokane|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|7 years ago|reply
It's a super fun idea, though. I would 100% put this in the background, or even the foreground, of some future scifi scape.
[+] [-] Semiapies|7 years ago|reply
You're going to need damn good eyes to read Dotsies at anything like 13px, and I suspect even the sharp-eyed are going to misread a lot. Size Dotsies text up to the point that people of average vision can read it as reliably as a normal font at a reasonable size, and I don't think you're going to get much, if any, greater information density.
I'm reminded of Speedtalk, a language from Robert Heinlein's story "Gulf", which had every combination of phoneme and delivery (pitch, length, etc.) represent a word in the Basic English vocabulary. So, every spoken "word" in the language is actually a full sentence. But, it takes intense futuristic training just to be able to speak vaguely intelligibly in it, because all the normal imprecisions of speaking (much less speaking in a new language) take any tiny error from "You used 'record' as a noun, but with a long 'e' and the stress on the second syllable." to "You have a hovercraft, and it's full of what???"
Now imagine trying to follow speech in such a language if the speaker's out of breath, alarmed, surrounded by background noise, etc. Just not enough redundancy for reliable communication.
[+] [-] IgorPartola|7 years ago|reply
Dotsies seem to make a tradeoff where they optimize for higher information density at the cost of much higher error rate (or requirement for precision and accuracy if you will). I also definitely see your point about font sizes. Basically it’s a valiant attempt at a reimagined alphabet but I don’t think it actually achieves higher info density in the real world.
[+] [-] jdougan|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neurobashing|7 years ago|reply
“Designed to be represented either in binary or symbol-written form, Marain is also regarded as an aesthetically pleasing language by the Culture. The symbols of the Marain alphabet can be displayed in three-by-three grids of binary (yes/no, black/white) dots and thus correspond to nine-bit wide binary numbers.”
[+] [-] billconan|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Koshkin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qlk1123|7 years ago|reply
[cite needed][original research?]
[+] [-] SSchick|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spyckie2|7 years ago|reply
http://dotsies.org/design-your-own/#iaeouvxnsfrcbqlzkjwygphm...
A couple of design values:
- vowels 1 dot seems like a good plan
- ending with s / y should be easily recognizable
- tall letters should be tall (tlbdk etc)
To learn, read one word from the top paragraph and see if it "looks" like the bottom dotsies. Then gradually try to read the paragraph without looking at the next word.
Open to improvements!
[+] [-] trogdoro|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arc2|7 years ago|reply
Do you think "Fußgängerübergänge" can be read as "Fussgangerubergange" or "zażółć" as "zazolc"? (German and Polish respectively)
[+] [-] slipgate55|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nabla9|7 years ago|reply
If we could start from the scratch, Hangul style syllabic blocks that combine alphabetic and syllabic systems might be the ideal.
[+] [-] the_clarence|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trogdoro|7 years ago|reply
Right you are.
It took me a while to be able to shrink it down. You have to start large and gradually shrink it down.
> If I could watch someone reading fluently in dotsies
Any time.
[+] [-] userbinator|7 years ago|reply
I wonder if I'm the only one who would find it easier to read if it was just ASCII printed in binary instead of its own symbol-set. ASCII has some patterns which make it easy to memorise, and it's something a lot of developers have indeed memorised already. That would make a great "1337 hax0r" font.
...and why not go the whole hog and make it 8 bits, so you can encode all of Unicode (as UTF-8)...
[+] [-] caf|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xenadu02|7 years ago|reply
The most trivial is omission of vowels, instead relying on context or vowel marks (or some combination). Wrds r srprsngl lgbl wtht vwls. Anotherisomissionofspaces.
Lots of western (and other) scripts have been written these ways in the past. Neither can be said to have evolved to make text easier to write! Including the vowels is more difficult to write and both are more costly because they take up more space, which means larger tablets or more animal skin and ink required.
We settled on including vowels and word spacing to make text more legible, so I'm not sure where the author's claim about latin working the way it does to benefit writing comes from. If the OP wants to claim letters like b/d/p/q, m/n, w/v/u, etc are to the benefit of writers OK but "dotsies" is even worse in lacking distinct shapes.
Humans like symmetry and patterns so it seems far more likely some letters are variations on a pattern or mirror images because it is visually pleasing or easy to stamp new letters out of existing known shapes. If you think about it a/b/c/d/e/g/o/p/q are arguably variations on the same pattern, with g -> j, and j -> i following.