Alphabetic Design Elements - or: I've had too much coffee!

[DaveC426913]

This is what happens when I have coffee after 2PM. (I am not a coffee-drinker.) Did this in my head between 12 and 1AM while staring at the ceiling of my bedroom.

I've uniquely defined the letters of the alphabet with a maximum of 14 design elements.

I chose Century Gothic as a typeface with the simplest, most basic, elemental styles (sans serif and no funky tails on 'a's). I cheated with 'u'. It doesn't actually have a spine in CG, but, in my world 'u' is best defined having a spine.

I had the biggest struggle with v,x and z. Element-wise, they have a lot of overlap. I finally had to add two "Symmetry" Elements just for these cases, (which, as you will see below, is a very inefficient use of parameters).

Some are sort of default characters. 'c' requires only one element type.

Some are on the long tail of the frequency curve, with 'g' having the most elements (5). Now, that is a little over-specified - g is already uniquely-defined without needing to specify that it is counter-facing. But since I had to add 'Counter-facing' to distinguish p from d and q from b, it just incidentally applies to g. Similar thing happens for horizontal symmetry with 'i' and 'l'.

 

[DaveC426913]

1AM till 2AM14 element types to define 26 unique characters is not great, really. It takes .54 element-types per character, which is really wasteful.If we take a side-trip into abstracted optimization, the theoretical minimum element-types is 5. 2^5 = 32 which is enough in theory to uniqiuely define every letter:

(though they wouldn't appear in order like a binary sequence graph):

This solution is highly theoretical because it is going to be very difficult to find a mere 5 design elements that, in combination, uniquely define each of the 26 letters.

Glossary: Element
An element type has a loose set of conditions:

• It must be a common element (i.e. 2 or more characters require it; so "x-shaped" doesn't qualify as a element type)
• It must be a simple, basic construction element ('diagonal' is a basic element; 'shaped like a p' applies to both p and b but doesnt qualify as simple/basic).

5 elements to define 26 characters is pretty good. That's .19 element-types per character.

But even 2^5 is a little high for the theoretical minimum. (As long as we have the ability to define 32 characters uniquely, we will always wonder: what do those extra 6 possible characters look like?**)Technically, we really only need 4.7 element types (2^4.7 = 26). That gives .18 - the best possible ratio of elements to characters.

Is it possible to have a fractional element type? I think it is. Some elements are subsets of others, so they don't have complete independent range.

Ascender/descender are mutually exclusive (well, not by rule, but by there being no such character). It might be possible to formulate a sub-element type. And there's a lot of overlap between 'tail' 'arch' and 'open loop'.

More work to be done...**

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Beyond_Zebra!
(definitely more than six!)

 

[Baluncore]

Look at the way Chinese characters are entered on a western keyboard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_method

In August 1983, exactly 40 years ago, a Chinese engineer named Wang Yongmin developed the first popular way to input Chinese characters into a computer: Wubi. He did it by breaking down a Chinese character into different strokes and assigning several strokes to each letter on the QWERTY keyboard.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/08/23/1078274/fascinating-evolution-typing-chinese-characters/