Alternative Layout System
16 comments
·June 26, 2025eddythompson80
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.
cjcenizal
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!
Groxx
"Same Sizer" is exactly how I feel about justified text
philsnow
"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...
RattlesnakeJake
This is horrendous. I love it.
Gualdrapo
Their "imager" tool is really cool, though:
shreyarajpal
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
gtr32x
Author made frequent reference to Hebrew text, is there a particular reason historical Hebrew texts uses these methods?
elchananHaas
Yes. A combination of being hand copied and the text having no punctuation.
Fellshard
Could it also be an artifact of using scrolls, and needing to sharply delimit 'pages' of text?
rhet0rica
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.
echelon
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.
mbaytas
immediately ordered the book
fascinating checkout flow
vsviridov
Thanks, I hate it. /s
Reminds me of the Dotsies system for fast reading, only this makes reading slow...
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)