I think "Same Sizer" looks ugly because characters are stretched mechanically, so each line has different width. Ideally, the lines should all keep their widths, and the position should be stretched.

I think a better application of "all words have the same size" principle can be seen in Vietnamese calligraphy, which sometimes combines Latin characters with Chinese-adjacent writing style, e.g. https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%C4%90%E1%BB%91i_-... (this is written in Latin script split into equal squares)

• pavlov

  today at 9:24 AM

  Huh. I would never have noticed that your example image is actually in Latin script.

  Because I don't read Chinese, anything that looks enough like Chinese seems to mentally go into the bin of "I can't understand this anyway." (I guess in this case it would help if I knew Vietnamese because then I would recognize familiar words and syllables in this calligraphy.)

  Fascinating effect.

  • yorwba

    today at 10:45 AM

    It does not help that "hoa" is stylized as something resembling の口亽.

• floppyd

  today at 6:25 AM

  I really wanted to see the example you linked, but the link is broken

  • rapnie

    today at 10:13 AM

    I had the problem that navigating the page in firefox almost set fire to my CPU on my 2yr old linux dev laptop. Really liked the visualisations, though.

In non-phoenitic languages, i.e. English, many of these methods are painful, especially "Last is First". See "I", but then it's "In", so you need to mentally backtrack some understanding. See "t", but then it's "that", so if you're subvocalizing to read, you need to reform the phoneme because 't' is a different phoneme from 'th'.

• pfortuny

  today at 6:52 AM

  Just trying to help: "i.e." stands for "id est", which means "that is".

  In your text, you should rather say "e.g." (exempli gratia), which means "for instance", "for example".

• dxdm

  today at 6:27 AM

  Isn't reading more like pattern recognition than parsing letter-for-letter? It seems to work like that for me. There's also the somewhat famous text where each word's letters are jumbled and people can still read it fluently. Maybe that's not the case for everyone, though, and people have different ways of making sense of written text.

  Edit: Quick search turned up this article about the jumbled-word phenomenon, containing the example text at the top: https://observer.com/2017/03/chunking-typoglycemia-brain-con...

  • speerer

    today at 6:37 AM

    I once attended a short workshop where the person presenting encouraged us to switch between two modes of reading away from sub-vocalizing and into pattern recognition. The result was much faster reading without loss of understanding.

    He didn't use those terms but adopting them from this thread - I learned that day that these really are two distinct modes.

I have some eye issues, namely a lazy eye and double vision. I find same-sizer remarkably easy to read. Easier than standard text, which is very curious.

I almost wonder if the idea could be used as a sort of accessibility mode.

• JoBrad

  today at 11:29 AM

  Other than a very slight astigmatism, I have no visuals issues, but also found the same-sizer text much easier to read than I thought it would be.

Every once in a while I come across something so beautifully stupid that all I can see is the genius behind it, and it fills me with joy. Well done!

• n3storm

  today at 4:00 AM

  Did you try to read it aloud? Your voice instantly becomes robotic :D

Ok, I want the "Hyphenator" layout, but with more than just one word. I want the extra text to wrap around while the font keeps getting smaller to mimic how I used to take hand notes in college and need to shove in some stuff with no space left in the line.

fun read. a few years ago i got pretty obsessed with boustrophedon script, which feels to me in a similar category. still feels like such an elegant solution to 'oh these lines are getting too long'. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon

I want to like this, but the page keeps reloading itself every few seconds. It’s really annoying.

"Last is first" very much reminds me of the custos/custodes seen often in Gregorian chant notation, which come at the end of a line and are a hint of the first note in the next line (so while your eye is finding the start of the next line, you already know the pitch, even though it typically does not include the syllable).

See e.g. https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.18/Documentation/notation/ancien...

This is horrendous. I love it.

so cool!

in devnagri script text is aligned at the top of the line instead of the bottom of the line. e.g. https://www.typotheque.com/research/devanagari-the-makings-o.... would be cool to see a version where roman scripts are top-aligned, bottom uneven instead of the other way round

Their "imager" tool is really cool, though:

https://alternativelayoutsystem.com/imager/

"Same Sizer" is exactly how I feel about justified text

these layouts break kerning rules. render engines expect horizontal flow, steady spacing. but with same sizer or echoed lines, glyph logic goes off path. spacing's no longer font native, it's forced by layout. font stops being just visual, becomes part of layout logic. whole engine ends up doing things it wasn't ment for. then layout will start mutates typography logic iteslf

Of course it's Swiss.

Author made frequent reference to Hebrew text, is there a particular reason historical Hebrew texts uses these methods?

• elchananHaas

  yesterday at 11:23 PM

  Yes. A combination of being hand copied and the text having no punctuation.

  • Fellshard

    today at 12:10 AM

    Could it also be an artifact of using scrolls, and needing to sharply delimit 'pages' of text?

    • rhet0rica

      today at 12:18 AM

      No. Both Torah scrolls and ancient Greco-Roman papyrus scrolls are written sideways, in columns of a consistent width. The rollers are held in the hands.

      Modern fantasy depictions of vertical scrolls leave an erroneous impression that the book proceeds in a downward direction, in addition to the cliché use of 'see above' to prefer to anything previously in the text. Hypertext media and text editors further support this misunderstanding by applying continuous scrolling to a document. This confusion is quite new, perhaps as recent as the 1980s.

I make it more readable I want to squash the words further so the english becomes more logographic by:

A) using an alphabetic shorthand ike superwrite: https://www.reddit.com/r/shorthand/comments/pttlnn/superwrit...

B) squeeze the individual letters together in a font, extreme negative tracking while they're still distinguishable.

C) substitute frequent short words with symbols and prefix them to the next word, e.g.: - 'not' with symbol: "!" - 'and' with symbol: "&' - 'or' with symbol: "|" - 'the' with symbol: "`" - 'a' with symbol: "*" - 'at' with symbol: "@" - 'about/around/circa' with symbol "~" - 'of' with symbol '\' - 'for/per' with symbol '%' - 'in' with symbol '#' - 'to' with symbol '>' - 'from' with symbol '<' - 'on' with symbol '^' - 'as' with symbol '-' - 'is' with symbol '=' - 'with' with symbols 'w/' & 'w/o' (without) ...

This applied to a fictionally motivated glyphs, like Klingon, would be interesting.

immediately ordered the book

fascinating checkout flow

These are so creative!

I love "Same Sizer" for titles and design, and I don't think I'd hate "Fill the Space" in body text if glyphs (such as the key) were used.

[dead]

Thanks, I hate it. /s

Reminds me of the Dotsies system for fast reading, only this makes reading slow...

Or just use CSS

  text-wrap: balance

• junon

  today at 5:38 AM

  This is a set of InDesign scripts. Not CSS.