Comment by demetrius
6 months ago
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)
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.
I can read Chinese and still cannot process that image as Latin script. They've turned every letter into a Chinese character component. It makes my head hurt.
I still can't read it despite trying.
The page below, in the “Summary” section, has a version in normal font, starting with “Tân niên”
(Also, interestingly, there is a version in Chinese characters. Looks like the whole phrase is a borrowing from Classical Chinese? Probably the readers know the phrase as set expression, so it's easier for them.)
It does not help that "hoa" is stylized as something resembling の口亽.
Along similar lines, the calligraphy here is quite impressive: https://www.reddit.com/r/language/comments/1gmzro8/what_scri...
Huh. That's a good way to explain how Hangul works I guess :)
FWIW, I call this approach 'square' writing, and have compiled some links at https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/square/index
Probably the most interesting one is the 'Hangulatin' font (https://www.t26.com/fonts/22320-Hangulatin-EN), which is exactly what it sounds like, and unfortunately has been abandoned/linkrotten but you can see a lot of it in the old video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0syCsC0_4s
I really wanted to see the example you linked, but the link is broken
I don't know why. It works for me.
As an alternative, you can go to Wikipedia and paste File:Đối - Tết 2009.jpg into the search bar.
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.
navigating the page in firefox on my 2 year old Mac M1, with about 50 tabs open and a few other applications running including Krita, Chrome, VS Studio, The Terminal, Preview and a couple finder windows gave no problems whatsoever, so maybe they should look at it but not high priority.