It’s late, my back hurts, my legs hurt, but we went for a long walk today, met my stepmom, her partner, my sister, her husband, we had cake, we talked about the future, we rode the the train, we made stewed apples, we watched an episode of Deep Space 9. It was a good day.
So here I am again, trying to practice my toki pona. It started with me stumbling over a posting by @ice; they were posting a toki pona sentence using the sitelen pona script, a drawing using the sitelen sitelen hieroglyphs, and an English translation.
I started wondering. If I were to happen upon this sentence, would I arrive at the same English translation? I started thinking about it, I wrote down my thoughts, I liked what I had done, I was reminded of my toki pona wiki… and I asked @ice for permission to post the sentences to the wiki and write some additional thoughts about it. Join me, if you feel like doing some translation exercises and speculating. A kind of bite-sized language meditation.
We use a simple language to communicate. Good words. toki pona. – Toki Wiki at The Transjovian Council
Toki Wiki at The Transjovian Council
Well, not really. But if you’re interested in the exercises, visit the wiki. You’ll find the links on the page about sentences; and you’ll find instructions on how to use the wiki on the page about writing.
Now, sitelen sitelen also fascinated me. I had already been fascinated by sitelen pona, and my wiki uses the linja pona font to automatically render toki pona passages using sitelen pona. It’s fantastic. You wrote something like “toki pona” and it automatically renders correctly, with many ligature definitions to render it all. But sitelen sitelen is different. It’s design is inspired by Mayan hieroglyphs: face-like structures, stacked both horizontally and vertically. It looks fantastic.
Learn how to write in the hieroglyphic blocks known as sitelen sitelen. This is a system of non-linear writing you can use to free your mind or break from regular thought. – sitelen sitelen, by Jonathan Gabel
sitelen sitelen, by Jonathan Gabel
There is an automatic, Javascript-based renderer. I guess this is moving away from the mindful exercise of using toki pona to calm down and focus on the basics, to keep the hand busy and the spirit free. And yet, I am fascinated.
On this page you can type (proper) Toki Pona. The text is parsed into structures that can be rendered in the style of Sitelen Sitelen. – Live Toki Pona Sitelen Sitelen Renderer, by Olaf Janssen
Live Toki Pona Sitelen Sitelen Renderer, by Olaf Janssen
I started thinking: shouldn’t it be possible to embed all this code into a font? I installed FontForge, I’ve skimmed the Design With FontForge ebook, and now I’m reading the beginning of work-in-progress book called “Fonts and Layout for Global Scripts”.
A book about how to create new typefaces using FontForge – Design With FontForge
A free book about font design, Unicode and the computer processing of complex text, by Simon Cozens. – Fonts and Layout for Global Scripts
Fonts and Layout for Global Scripts
What I’m trying to figure out is this: how feasible would it be to write sitelen sitelen rendering entirely within OpenType. That is, not just like linja pona and friends, but the full Maya-style hieroglyphs. Janson’s renderer must contain all the SVG glyphs necessary, and the rules to parse toki pona and derive a layout. Fonts are somehow complete programming environments.
You read that right! It’s a video game in a font! A font as in “Time New Roman”. The entire game is enclosed in fontemon.otf, no javascript, no html, all font. – Fontemon: World's first video game in a font!
Fontemon: World's first video game in a font!
This rabbit hole is deep. I’m assuming that my interest is going to fade soon enough. But Simon Cozens’ blog and this incomplete book he’s writing… fascinating!
#Toki Pona #Fonts
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Well. I’m not so sure anymore. On the one hand, the task seems big and impossible. On the other hand, when I showed my wife examples of sitelen sitelen she laughed and asked whether anybody else was actually using it. Erh… I guess the answer is “No.” She said that it looked nice and cute, a bit like a colouring book, a bit like meditation. And I realized, that you don’t write a program for meditation. You don’t write a font for something that is meant to be drawn by hand.
I shall find something else to do. 🙂
– Alex 2021-10-04 22:10 UTC
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I am still reading Fonts and Layout for Global Scripts by Simon Cozens and I love it. It talks about everything: what is a glyph, a character, a code-point, an encoding, Shift JIS, EUC, Unicode, UCS, UTF-32, UTF-16, UTF-8, emoji… I love it!
Fonts and Layout for Global Scripts
– Alex 2021-10-09 08:00 UTC
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More good stuff to read.
Despite this, we can’t ignore the composition of the Consortium’s members, directors, and officers, the people who define the everyday writing systems of all languages across the globe. They are comprised largely of white men (and a few white women) whose first language was either English or another European language. – I Can Text You A Pile of Poo, But I Can’t Write My Name
I Can Text You A Pile of Poo, But I Can’t Write My Name
– Alex 2021-11-01 21:44 UTC
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More Unicode:
Our goal is to promote usage and support of the UTF-8 encoding and to convince that it should be the default choice of encoding for storing text strings in memory or on disk, for communication and all other uses. We believe that our approach improves performance, reduces complexity of software and helps prevent many Unicode-related bugs. We suggest that other encodings of Unicode (or text, in general) belong to rare edge-cases of optimization and should be avoided by mainstream users. – UTF-8 Everywhere
– Alex 2021-11-02 07:40 UTC