| I appreciate the support :) Creator of Dotsies here. I've been using Dotsies to read books since 2012 (maybe around 100). At first on a Kindle and then on a Kobo after Amazon stopped letting you add your own fonts. I reached my normal reading speed a few years ago, and now reading it is fairly second nature. I now prefer it to normal fonts, and have the feeling that my eyes are racing unnecessarily from side to side when I use them. With normal fonts I'm also less likely to "seek" to different parts of the page, and thus feel a bit handicapped with them. > the brain uses a hierarchy of constructs like circles, lines, corners, etc It's a little counter intuitive if you haven't tried it, but the shape-seeking aspects of our visual systems do come into play with grids of dots. As others have said below, the words jump out at you as shapes. Sort of in the way that letters normally do. Just to approximate it, consider: :..'. But you may have to look at words a few thousand times before you get the full effect of this. In general, the less visual noise and redundancy there is, the easier it is to recognize shapes. Consider looking at a pile of sand vs a pile of boulders, to get a sense of the extreme ends of this spectrum. Pile of sand: high complexity, harder to make out visual shapes. Pile of boulders: low complexity, easy to make out shapes. It is possible to map each letter to unique arrangements of 1000 disordered grains of sand, but clearly a few boulders per letter would be better. Consider that it takes about 20 pixels to represent each Latin letter. We scrapped reading fancy calligraphy because they would take more like 40px or so pixels to represent. And the extra flourishes really just added superfluity to the page. Only that was difficult for us to see, since we were so used to the calligraphy as the norm. I think it's naive to think the current state is the apex. Let's get rid of the remaining flourishes! Calligraphy is sand. Latin is marbles (or spaghetti might be apter). Binary grids are boulders. Just stare at the equivalent paragraphs under "How much better is it?" on dotsies.org for a while and you'll get a sense of this. (Especially if you can do so while imagining you're unfamiliar with Latin letters.) I think I made a joke in 2012 about cave-men waving their spears at the stone-age version of hacker news claiming their bison heads and triangles couldn't possibly be improved on :). Just wanted to give a quick summary. Will reply to other comments directly. Btw I'm also the creator of Xiki, which has been discussed on HN as well, and has a stronger claim to originality/practicality. I did 2 kickstarters for it, which didn't get much hacker news attention, much to my disappointment. I'm doing a third soon and am hoping for more interest/abuse :). My new version will switch to using the markdown format, and will hopefully revolutionize the command line. |
I'm also packaging the fonts up for Void Linux but was unable to find any licensing information. Do you have dotsies under Creative Commons? Did I just miss something?