Usually writing small, in all-caps, except code: in lowercase, and the "t" and "i" retain their lower curve. Cursive is difficult; easy to write, but (later) hard to read.
Can see how penmanship there would be appreciated.
For anyone interested in optimising this further, orthographic (letter-based) cursive shorthand systems are the answer. I personally only know part of the Melin system[1], but there are variants designed for English as the primary language too. (Melin is of course perfectly usable with English also.)
The flow of a cursive shorthand system is unmatched by anything else. I highly recommend learning enougnh to experience it.
(The drawback with more phonetic systems like Gregg is that one has to learn entirely new ways of spelling words. But normal English spelling is so complicated that tradeoff can be worth it for heavy usage. Orthographic systems often also contain phonetic components, but they tend to be optional extensions that improve efficiency, rather than required like with purely phonetic systems.)
You may want to look into Sütterlin script. It's a bit harder to learn than standard cursive, but it's very pretty, and a level-0 encryption since few people can read it nowadays.
Huh, I just indirectly learned from this article that the way I write a lower-case "t" in cursive is a Dutch way of doing so (edit: sollniss' comment implies it was a common style in Germany too). A quick search suggests it has been replaced with an English style of "t" in the last decades too.
I wonder if that makes my handwriting harder to read for anyone who isn't Dutch and over 40 years old.
Anyway, just bringing it up because you don't need to lift up your pen to write that kind of "t".
Search for "koordschrift" on https://primarium.info/countries/the-netherlands/ to find the illustration showing how I was taught to write it in the late 80s. It's the letter vaguely shaped like a pine tree.
I have had similar thoughts recently when attending language courses where I write a lot of notes by hand. This problem is exacerbated by umlauts. If the language doesn't have letters like ō (are there any? i only see this letter to represent a sound, never in a word), then the two dots can be replaced with a line and so, I guess, the lowercase T technique from the blog post could be adapted to it. I think I know what I am gonna do after work today
This is unrelated to the main thesis of the article, but worth pointing out as too many people equate the Cyrillic script with Russian language.
The Cyrillic script was invented in Bulgaria (during the First Bulgarian Empire), and was used to write Bulgarian language, creating a huge literary corpus, long before it began spreading to Kievan Rus. The Russian language itself comes from Old Bulgarian / Old Church Slavonic, as does Serbian and other "Slavic" languages.
And no, Bulgaria was never part of Russia nor the Soviet Union.
This is the kind of thing that makes cursive painful to read. The `i` and `j` in this script are harder to quickly lex, and the `t` (especially in the `tt` ligature) with the added loop flourish diverges sufficiently from a standard `t` to make it hard to decipher in running text.
In text, as in code, I prefer to optimize for easy reading rather than faster writing.
This reminds me of build-time optimizations increasing compile times for faster performance at runtime. A tradeoff I could make without a sweat in prod, but not so much during development, at a certain scale. It feels like a dichotomy almost unavoidable in life.
Easy reading is achieved by typesetting later if needed. Writing by hand is painful and slow and it makes sense to optimize for the write operation as much as possible
I wonder to what extent this is just habituation to styles that do not do what they are doing.
If I might, modern people tend to find cursive difficult to read. This depends somewhat on culture (nastaliq is the default in Iran) but is a kind of generalized trend that holds for most modern developed countries (see gyousho and sousho almost disappearing in daily use in Japan outside of menus and signage and - increasingly rarely - formal letters). It's not as if, I think, that when these older forms were more common that people struggled to read them (at least, not anymore than individual handwriting typically causes problems).
People who grew up writing cursive also often struggle with older scribal hand (though less so than someone who did not grow up with cursive), say from 1500s-1700s. Again, I think it's unlikely that the writers of those hands were so constrained by medium and technology (or cultural norms) that they chose to write in a way that was deemed inaccessible. (One might, if not attenuated to it, say that sousho is akin to deliberate cultural obfuscation, but my experience suggests that you quickly learn to recognize the patterns in kuzushiji.)
In the case of CJK scripts, brush pens haven't changed. Fountain pens are perfectly adequate for cursive (though some nibs were developed that differ specifically to make them even more suitable). For nastaliq, as for naskh, a reed pen is fine for both. (Modern pencils, ballpoints, and typical modern Western-tipped FPs do struggle to give nastaliq the line variation needed for a legible result). For Western scripts, pens and their tipping simply hasn't changed much beyond a decrease in the flexibility of nibs in FPs. (Something which also varied historically - pens oriented at most shorthand styles always had hard tips, excluding those shorthand styles that incorporate line-width variation which was meant to be achieved with a flexible tip.)
So my thinking is this is mostly something that comes down to 'are you used to it' and shifts in this area have a lot mroe to do with culture than anything else.
There are of course two other matters.
First, how easy something is to learn - I think the only place this is a consideration is sousho of the scripts I've mentioned (even with nastaliq's hundreds of thousands of possible ligatures).
Second, are the people around you accustomed (culturally) to the hand you are writing in, and how hard is it for them to adapt if they are not. Broadly speaking, people are not accustomed to reading much cursive in general these days, let alone one that varies from the recent hands of the area. So generally if one is writing for coworkers say, one would do well to simply write in print or at most a semi-cursive style.
In that regard the more that something deviates from its print form, the harder it will be to read for them. This ultimately comes down to interpersonal consideration - if you're writing for yourself or people who are regularly reading/writing cursive, I don't think the author's changes will be a significant issue beyond a short acclimatization phase that does not extend far beyond the phase that would be needed to adapt to an individual's personal quirks in a hand that has had some recent sway in the local area (and those hands do differ by country/area, quite a lot). (As a tangent, some of these tricks of the author's are commonplace in specific historical European hands.)
It also makes writing more difficult --- the doubled-up pen movements help get ink flowing, esp. on certain letters at certain angles, esp. w/ a fountain pen.
> In text, as in code, I prefer to optimize for easy reading rather than faster writing.
Author here!
It really depends on what you write.
When I write something for others to read, I type it or (on special occasions) write it one letter at a time with a calligraphy pen.
I’m the only intended reader for almost all of my handwriting (personal journal, article drafts, exercises, and notes). In this setting, it’s much more natural to optimize the script for enjoyment, convenience, and speed. But even then, I think my script is still quite legible.
No experienced reader reads letter-by-letter. These issues are not really problems, because you read whole words by sight and are not usually confused by whether a letter is an "i" or a "j".
I don't cross ts either, I tested out on a piece of paper and what I do is a vertical (slightly curved) stroke, loop to the left, cross the stroke and then a downwards stroke.
I tried the jitter example and instinctively I dotted the j but not the i for some reason. Would love to see some research on this.
I really miss cursive honestly, at least for me I feel a much closer connection to the writing than when typing.
I really like the result. Especially the i and j with the connected dot. I expected them to look off but they really integrate nicely.
That being said I don't think it is about Cyrillic vs Latin but more about traditional cursive vs modern.
The traditional Latin cursives were all pretty much optimized to be written in one running flow. Kurrent and cursive all come from Latin currere which means running.
Admittedly none of them go as far as connecting the i and j dots but otherwise they are pretty much completely connected. But then again I also never seen anyone writing a word and doing the dots afterwards. With traditional cursive you do your upstroke, lift the pen, place the dot (or short short stroke), reverse and do the downstroke. Lifting the pen yes, backtracking no.
With the connected dots OP's Backtrack-Free Cursive still wins here and I really like that because someone found an optimization to something that already has been optimized for centuries.
>But then again I also never seen anyone writing a word and doing the dots afterwards.
Interesting, I'd never really heard of it being done any other way. I suppose it occurred to me that it could be done otherwise, but I'd more or less assumed the "all in a batch at the end of each word" way was all but universal. (When writing at speed -- trying to keep up with an overflowing buffer -- this tends to lead to all the 't's in a word sharing one long crossbar, and the dots floating somewhere high and right of where they should be, depending on how far I'm lagging behind the verbal "point of focus", if that makes any sense.)
Wondering how many people are like me and hate writing in cursive.
I stopped using it right after graduating high school (where it was required), never used in drafts after elementary school, and only ever used normal print letters in the university (and also included TeX commands because I was typesetting lecture notes later and was figuring out the optimal command set on the fly).
I’m surprised, as the whole points of it are speed and duration (less cramping, less energy when moving the wrist). Discrete lettering is simply slower because it requires more motion.
If I need to take notes by hand, I definitely prefer cursive writing (though I have my own variations & preferences, for example I write almost all capital letters in the print versions). I never saw a reason to learn to draw a more type-like font by hand, so that definitely feels much worse whenever I decide to do it (e.g. for filling in certain forms).
Same story, except that I could stop writing in cursive after middle school as nobody in high school could be bothered to demand it. The only remnants of my cursive writing days are as part of my signature.
I don't hate writing in cursive, It's simply that I do it so badly that I use printing for almost everything except my signature. I deeply admire people who write cursive well. It is a beautiful form of communication.
I had a penmanship teacher in high school advise me to use printing because at least she could read it. I suspect that it pained her to give me that advice, but for me it was a gift.
What version of Chrome do you use? The images are encoded in .webp for compactness; I hoped that most of the browsers in use support this format, but I might have to go multi-source after all.
An italian influencer started speaking in italics/cursive. It's a silly thing, but the thought of pronouncing words differently because they are on bold or italics is interesting
I am not sure what country the author is in, because when I learned to write English in school (decades ago, and it was the language of instruction) very few letters required backtrack, pretty much only ‘i’ and ‘j’. I just looked at an image of the US Declaration of Independence and the same is true (the ‘t’ has a wiggle in the middle).
Other languages are similar: for German if you look at either Kurrent or Sütterlin really only i gets special treatment. The umlauts are given as two dots in examples, but when i read letters and other informal documents they usually end up being a bar.
I like the connected dot for i and j! Clever, and i will try to adopt it. Most of my handwritten writing these days is for myself.
I like writing in cursive, but I don’t see backtracking as a problem. I backtrack quite a lot in Cyrillic, even in Russian, e.g. I always underline ш and write a line over т (which looks like m) to distinguish them (otherwise they look quite similar, see the famous example лишили лилии — you might want to google it if you haven’t seen it yet). I also normally write д as ∂, which breaks the flow.
Belarusian Cyrillic requires more backtracking: we have і, ў, obligatory ё, apostrophes. Never saw it as a problem.
Try writing this sentence on your cell phone keyboard, if you use a "swipe" type keyboard interface. Fun! (All on the top row, so it is just sliding around on the top):
The point about interaction with undo in a digital inking app is interesting. Seems like with ML handwriting recognition, we could create a handwriting "text editor" instead of a drawing app that understands the semantic structure of the text and operates at that level instead of the individual stroke level.
I had some friends who worked on this for a while but didn't get far with it. It turns out it's tricky to design a general purpose system that adapts to users' handwriting idiosyncrasies and is fast enough to work in real time with handwriting with sufficient accuracy.
Some of that work is still visible in the ChromeOS virtual keyboard handwriting mode, but it's very limited - one line at a time. https://cursive.apps.chrome/ (the built-in note-taking app on Chromebooks) has some interesting inking gestures for manipulating written words, but doesn't have any semantic-level understanding.
Great article! One perspective I'd like to share is that for me, the joy is mostly found in how beautiful the product is. From that standpoint, I don't particularly care how efficient I am at writing cursive. That said, this is a hand I would be interested to learn.
Latin Sütterlin (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ausgangsschrift#/media/Datei:S...) has an x without backtracking. At first it looks a bit weird with the two loops, but I think they are exaggerated for didactical reasons. If you train a bit you can make it look like an x by making the loops thinner. Put differently, this is the "opposing c's"-method, without lifting the pen between the two c's.
56 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 91.5 ms ] threadCan see how penmanship there would be appreciated.
Wouldn't the ф as well?
> [for the x], I draw two mirrored c’s
Isn't that what everyone is doing, or are we Frenchmen the exception?
For reference if the author reads this, we write the latin x exactly like the cyrillic х, i.e. reverse c, bottom-left to top-right diagonal, normal c.
The flow of a cursive shorthand system is unmatched by anything else. I highly recommend learning enougnh to experience it.
(The drawback with more phonetic systems like Gregg is that one has to learn entirely new ways of spelling words. But normal English spelling is so complicated that tradeoff can be worth it for heavy usage. Orthographic systems often also contain phonetic components, but they tend to be optional extensions that improve efficiency, rather than required like with purely phonetic systems.)
[1]: http://melinsstenografi.nu/image/sti-ukast.png
I wonder if that makes my handwriting harder to read for anyone who isn't Dutch and over 40 years old.
Anyway, just bringing it up because you don't need to lift up your pen to write that kind of "t".
Search for "koordschrift" on https://primarium.info/countries/the-netherlands/ to find the illustration showing how I was taught to write it in the late 80s. It's the letter vaguely shaped like a pine tree.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulausgangsschrift
The Cyrillic script was invented in Bulgaria (during the First Bulgarian Empire), and was used to write Bulgarian language, creating a huge literary corpus, long before it began spreading to Kievan Rus. The Russian language itself comes from Old Bulgarian / Old Church Slavonic, as does Serbian and other "Slavic" languages.
And no, Bulgaria was never part of Russia nor the Soviet Union.
In text, as in code, I prefer to optimize for easy reading rather than faster writing.
If I might, modern people tend to find cursive difficult to read. This depends somewhat on culture (nastaliq is the default in Iran) but is a kind of generalized trend that holds for most modern developed countries (see gyousho and sousho almost disappearing in daily use in Japan outside of menus and signage and - increasingly rarely - formal letters). It's not as if, I think, that when these older forms were more common that people struggled to read them (at least, not anymore than individual handwriting typically causes problems).
People who grew up writing cursive also often struggle with older scribal hand (though less so than someone who did not grow up with cursive), say from 1500s-1700s. Again, I think it's unlikely that the writers of those hands were so constrained by medium and technology (or cultural norms) that they chose to write in a way that was deemed inaccessible. (One might, if not attenuated to it, say that sousho is akin to deliberate cultural obfuscation, but my experience suggests that you quickly learn to recognize the patterns in kuzushiji.)
In the case of CJK scripts, brush pens haven't changed. Fountain pens are perfectly adequate for cursive (though some nibs were developed that differ specifically to make them even more suitable). For nastaliq, as for naskh, a reed pen is fine for both. (Modern pencils, ballpoints, and typical modern Western-tipped FPs do struggle to give nastaliq the line variation needed for a legible result). For Western scripts, pens and their tipping simply hasn't changed much beyond a decrease in the flexibility of nibs in FPs. (Something which also varied historically - pens oriented at most shorthand styles always had hard tips, excluding those shorthand styles that incorporate line-width variation which was meant to be achieved with a flexible tip.)
So my thinking is this is mostly something that comes down to 'are you used to it' and shifts in this area have a lot mroe to do with culture than anything else.
There are of course two other matters.
First, how easy something is to learn - I think the only place this is a consideration is sousho of the scripts I've mentioned (even with nastaliq's hundreds of thousands of possible ligatures).
Second, are the people around you accustomed (culturally) to the hand you are writing in, and how hard is it for them to adapt if they are not. Broadly speaking, people are not accustomed to reading much cursive in general these days, let alone one that varies from the recent hands of the area. So generally if one is writing for coworkers say, one would do well to simply write in print or at most a semi-cursive style.
In that regard the more that something deviates from its print form, the harder it will be to read for them. This ultimately comes down to interpersonal consideration - if you're writing for yourself or people who are regularly reading/writing cursive, I don't think the author's changes will be a significant issue beyond a short acclimatization phase that does not extend far beyond the phase that would be needed to adapt to an individual's personal quirks in a hand that has had some recent sway in the local area (and those hands do differ by country/area, quite a lot). (As a tangent, some of these tricks of the author's are commonplace in specific historical European hands.)
Author here!
It really depends on what you write.
When I write something for others to read, I type it or (on special occasions) write it one letter at a time with a calligraphy pen.
I’m the only intended reader for almost all of my handwriting (personal journal, article drafts, exercises, and notes). In this setting, it’s much more natural to optimize the script for enjoyment, convenience, and speed. But even then, I think my script is still quite legible.
Plus some uppercase e.g. A, B, H, right?
I don't cross ts either, I tested out on a piece of paper and what I do is a vertical (slightly curved) stroke, loop to the left, cross the stroke and then a downwards stroke.
I tried the jitter example and instinctively I dotted the j but not the i for some reason. Would love to see some research on this.
I really miss cursive honestly, at least for me I feel a much closer connection to the writing than when typing.
That being said I don't think it is about Cyrillic vs Latin but more about traditional cursive vs modern.
The traditional Latin cursives were all pretty much optimized to be written in one running flow. Kurrent and cursive all come from Latin currere which means running.
Admittedly none of them go as far as connecting the i and j dots but otherwise they are pretty much completely connected. But then again I also never seen anyone writing a word and doing the dots afterwards. With traditional cursive you do your upstroke, lift the pen, place the dot (or short short stroke), reverse and do the downstroke. Lifting the pen yes, backtracking no.
With the connected dots OP's Backtrack-Free Cursive still wins here and I really like that because someone found an optimization to something that already has been optimized for centuries.
Interesting, I'd never really heard of it being done any other way. I suppose it occurred to me that it could be done otherwise, but I'd more or less assumed the "all in a batch at the end of each word" way was all but universal. (When writing at speed -- trying to keep up with an overflowing buffer -- this tends to lead to all the 't's in a word sharing one long crossbar, and the dots floating somewhere high and right of where they should be, depending on how far I'm lagging behind the verbal "point of focus", if that makes any sense.)
I stopped using it right after graduating high school (where it was required), never used in drafts after elementary school, and only ever used normal print letters in the university (and also included TeX commands because I was typesetting lecture notes later and was figuring out the optimal command set on the fly).
I had a penmanship teacher in high school advise me to use printing because at least she could read it. I suspect that it pained her to give me that advice, but for me it was a gift.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WLzDcJBfLOk
Somehow, this caption appears to the right of two logos which clearly require two strokes for their ts. What happened?
Other languages are similar: for German if you look at either Kurrent or Sütterlin really only i gets special treatment. The umlauts are given as two dots in examples, but when i read letters and other informal documents they usually end up being a bar.
I like the connected dot for i and j! Clever, and i will try to adopt it. Most of my handwritten writing these days is for myself.
Belarusian Cyrillic requires more backtracking: we have і, ў, obligatory ё, apostrophes. Never saw it as a problem.
Rewrite proper prototype router report!
Anybody got a better one?
Some person recognized a problem they wanted solved and put a bunch of effort into creating a unique solution.
I love this stuff.
This post is perfect for HN.
I had some friends who worked on this for a while but didn't get far with it. It turns out it's tricky to design a general purpose system that adapts to users' handwriting idiosyncrasies and is fast enough to work in real time with handwriting with sufficient accuracy.
Some of that work is still visible in the ChromeOS virtual keyboard handwriting mode, but it's very limited - one line at a time. https://cursive.apps.chrome/ (the built-in note-taking app on Chromebooks) has some interesting inking gestures for manipulating written words, but doesn't have any semantic-level understanding.