Figure 1.
The system of fonts used on modern computers was designed primarily to support alphabetic languages, and has been adapted, only with some difficulty, to pictographic or ideographic writing systems. Rather than trying to bend the font system even further to fit Piktok glyphs I decided to design a new method for displaying pictographic glyphs on a computer screen that was not based on the idea of a font.
A font is really nothing more than a set of instructions to the computer telling it how to draw each letter or symbol in that font, but it is possible that the software might get its instructions for drawing a character from somewhere other than a font file. Consider the example of the familiar LED digital display used in clocks and calculators. Figure 1 shows such a display with each gridpoint labeled with a letter.
Figure 1.
We could instruct a computer to draw the digit "2" in this style simply by telling it which gridpoints to visit in what order. The sequence of letters ABDCEF would tell the computer to start at gridpoint A, draw a line to gridpoint B, then to gridpoint D, and so on. The result is the digit 2 drawn in the style of a digital display, as in figure 2.
Figure 2.
To give us a bit more flexibility in shaping the glyphs we could also tell the computer to draw curved lines. For example, the instruction AbD would tell the software to draw a curve from gridpoint A to gridpoint D, with the curve bending toward B. By putting B in lower case we are telling the software to make the curve go close to B without actually passing through it. The resulting curve would look like figure 3.
Figure 3.
A further refinement would be to allow elipical or oval curves. In this case we give two endpoints separated by a "long diagonal", such as gridpoints B and E. Then we pick which way to bend the curve and put that gridpoint in lower case, for example: BdE, which draws the curve shown in figure 4. Again, the curve passes close to D without going through it. (Note that AfE would have the same effect.)
Figure 4.
Since six gridpoints don't offer us much room to move around in we need to expand the gridwork to a square containing 25 gridpoints in order to provide design versatility for our glyphs. With this arrangement there are 24 different ways to draw a line from a single non-edge gridpoint. A glyph that covers 2 gridpoints can be drawn in 576 ways from 25 different starting points. There are nearly 40 million ways to draw a glyph that traverses six gridpoints, and if our glyphs cover 9 gridpoints the number of possible glyphs is 66,045,188,505,600, without ever touching the edge of the gridwork, which is more than enough for any language, human or alien. Figure 5 shows the 5 x 5 gridwork used by Piktok.
Figure 5.
Different styles of typography can be achieved by using different penpoints and different drawing rules to interpret the sequence of gridpoints. For example, figure 6 shows the same code, CW:VX:HiNsRqLgH interpreted several different ways, including caligraphic, italic and bold. Notice that when a long line is drawn, such as from C to W in this example, there is no need to specify each of the intervening gridpoints. It is assumed that to get from gridpoint C to W one must pass through gridpoints H, M, and R.
Figure 6.
Now that the code for a glyph actually contains all of the necessary instructions for drawing the glyph and the very concept of a font becomes redundant. Now fonts can be reserved for the job they do best, representing alphabetic characters in a wide variety of styles, and the job of displaying Piktok glyphs can be given over to the self-describing glyph.