On 10-11-08 06:07 AM, ddailey wrote: > > The concept of "how best" to write something got me wondering about > the following. > > Using an alphabet or a syllabary (like most of the languages of the > world excepting Chinese, Japanese, Mayan, and a few hundred others) > how much "space" does it take to convey our meaning.* > > Here's the question: if we relax the rules of English orthography just > a bit, so that instead of writing from left to write, we write from > left to right, or downward, or inward (by allowing glyphs to be > "inside" one another) , can we write legibly in less space? > > http://granite.sru.edu/~ddailey/svg/canonical.svg > <http://granite.sru.edu/%7Eddailey/svg/canonical.svg> > > This link shows a way of packing letters into a space under the > relaxed rules of right-or-down-or-inside. > > If we confine legibility by some empirically defined threshold on the > minimum size of a glyph, then if we allow physics to constrain the two > dimensional placement of our glyphs, subject to rotation scaling and > translation, to pack tightly, then can we find ways of expressing > English (or another language using some alphabet) using less space > than by writing simply unidirectionally? > That's pretty interesting. I think there's a bit of work from the field of visual modelling that might be useful and relevant here. For one thing, it would probably be useful to formally define a notion of "insideness" in the language definition of your graphical language (the "abstract syntax of the concrete syntax", in use modelling parlance). In your language definition, you would probably say that each glyph may have some region in which other glyphs may be placed, and that doing so has some relation to the abstract syntax, or the structure of the language. You may also define some constraints in terms of layout in the language definition.
You can see some similar work has been done here: http://msdl.cs.mcgill.ca/people/hv/teaching/MSBDesign/notes.ClassificationFrameworkVisualLanguages.pdf The author discusses classes of visual language, including "geometry-based languages", in which the meaning of the relationships between elements is primarily expressed in terms of their geometric properties (e.g. position relative to one another in the coordinate system, but I suppose this could be generalized). This includes a formal notion of "insideness" (see page 10, definition of ULinclude). Once you have formally defined the notion of "insideness" for your language, and have defined the special "inside" region for each element of your language (each glyph), and the special relationships between each element in the language, then it may be possible to begin applying existing layout algorithms, again perhaps from the domain of visual modelling languages. I'm thinking Harel's paper "An algorithm for blob hierarchy layout", while not completely relevant, might be an interesting place to start as a model for examining the efficacy of a particular layout for a particular graphical language: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=345240 There would be many ways of analyzing such algorithms, including usability/readability, and space-efficiency. Jake [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ ----- To unsubscribe send a message to: svg-developers-unsubscr...@yahoogroups.com -or- visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers and click "edit my membership" ----Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: svg-developers-dig...@yahoogroups.com svg-developers-fullfeatu...@yahoogroups.com <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: svg-developers-unsubscr...@yahoogroups.com <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
