Scriptorium

Writing is a technology with many possible designs

Scriptorium is the experimental arm of the FONT project. It asks three questions. What would English look like if it borrowed the best tricks of other scripts? Can ideas be written directly? And what else could a script for English have been?

None of its scripts is a new language. Nothing here has its own words, grammar or pronunciation. They are writing systems: different ways of putting meaning on a page, each taking a mechanism that a real script invented.

Weft: English that carries context

The base is a clean, semi-joined Latin hand. Letters stay distinct, because reading research shows we read words through their individual letters. On top, optional layers put back some of what speech carries and plain text loses:

• determinatives, a small mark above the first letter saying what kind of thing a word is (a person, a place, a feeling), as Egyptian scribes did;
• logograms for about fourteen very common words, as in medieval abbreviations and shorthand;
• phrase-lines binding each noun phrase, like the Devanagari headline;
• a negation mark: not stays in the text, and a wave flags the word it negates;
• threads, cascade and prosody: related words linked, lines broken at clauses, weight following stress;
• a mixed mode where key concepts become Radix glyphs inline, with the English word in small type above, like kanji among kana with ruby.

It is still English. You could read it without the layers; they add signal, not a new code.

Radix: glyphs for ideas

A Radix glyph is a picture of a definition, built from 34 primitives (LIGHT, MIND, PAST, FUTURE, PERSON, HOUSE, FEEL, SAY, NOT… and later MOON, STAR, MOUNTAIN, ROAD, DOOR, SEED, BIRD, KNOT) arranged by position: A|B side by side (category, then core), A/B stacked (quality over ground), A[B] enclosed (scope), A+B overlaid (negation or tension), ~A mirrored (reversed direction).

So idea is LIGHT/MIND, memory MIND/PAST, forget (MIND/PAST)+NOT, and nostalgia HOUSE[FEEL/PAST]. Because a glyph encodes meaning and not sound, a French or a Japanese reader can read it as well as an English one, as with Chinese characters and Blissymbolics. A left sweep means past and a right sweep future, so right-to-left readers get a mirrored edition.

Invent: what else English could have been

Each seed invents a writing system for the English alphabet from a stroke grammar whose defaults are the regularities of real scripts: a bias toward horizontal and vertical strokes, strokes that meet in junctions, a budget of complexity. The system can be an alphabet, a Cree-style rotation (one shape turned four ways for four vowels), an abugida, Hangul-style blocks, a featural script whose shapes come from where the mouth makes each sound, Ogham, or Braille. It can also borrow Latin letters and give them new values, as Sequoyah did for Cherokee.

How a glyph is made

generator → skeleton → pen → outline → finish → SVG · PNG · OTF

Generators emit skeletons, never ink: centre-lines in the order and direction a hand would write them, each tagged with the gesture that made it, after the eight strokes of 永. Pens are physical models, not styles: a broad nib’s contrast comes from its angle, as it does on paper; a brush’s pressure from the gesture; a reed stylus presses wedges into clay. That is why randomising a pen gives plausible writing instead of noise. The finish is the surface: ink, bleed, grain, the ink-saving operators from the project’s study of printing, guides and an x-ray of the skeleton.

Everything is seeded, so the same settings always give the same glyphs. It takes its method from Persona: families with a fixed structure and exposed numbers, vary and reseed on keys, locks for what you want to keep.

The research

Every element points back to a document, and every claim in those documents carries a tag saying how well it is supported: verified at the source, established, secondary, hypothesis, or design decision. The notes cover ink and legibility, how letters and words are read, the world’s writing systems and the patterns they share, and the psychology of communication. The work is written up in the paper Writing the Live Set.

Used here

The typeface of this website is SVDK Weft: Scriptorium’s Weft alphabet, inked by its monoline pen and exported as a font. The project pages for this workbench use its broad-nib cut.