Stylized Script Legibility

Users debate the legibility and visual similarities of compact, stylized, or shorthand forms of the Latin alphabet, often mistaking them for hieroglyphs, stenography, or historical scripts like Sütterlin, while discussing glyph confusions across fonts and languages.

➡️ Stable 0.6x Other
3,279
Comments
20
Years Active
5
Top Authors
#407
Topic ID

Activity Over Time

2007
3
2008
9
2009
28
2010
60
2011
58
2012
98
2013
94
2014
115
2015
131
2016
147
2017
200
2018
176
2019
196
2020
243
2021
271
2022
311
2023
369
2024
391
2025
369
2026
10

Keywords

CJK IMO HN CGA wikipedia.org union.ru EditorFiles GT letters latin stroke alphabet characters letter character leg leaning font

Sample Comments

atemerev Sep 7, 2017 View on HN

It looks more like stenography to me. You can even recognize the contours of regular Latin letters.

dylan604 May 27, 2025 View on HN

Wouldn't this be closer to hieroglyphics?

amelius May 7, 2023 View on HN

If true then why are Latin and Arabic glyphs so different?

deutronium Aug 17, 2016 View on HN

Very nice! For some reason I thought it was for letters, and was wondering why it thought my 'h' looked like a '6' heh

anonsivalley652 Feb 27, 2020 View on HN

S 5 6 GP R2 Z8 Blook similar, depending on the fontIt would be better to include some lower case characters which have more visual variability than trying to obsess over an arbitrary, inflexible stylistic "design."

billwear Apr 11, 2017 View on HN

You might try to see if it's come kind of contextual speedwriting. I learned a version of speedwriting in college in which the letter "e" and the letter "i" are exactly the same and deduced later by context; likewise, the letter "h" and the letters "la" appear to be the same. In other words, it might be more of a crude symbolic code. Just a thought.

blt Sep 9, 2013 View on HN

IMO, the rough shapes of the letters are too similar. It's not very legible.

Avshalom Aug 31, 2025 View on HN

Legibility would be my guess. Can't confuse ᴇ for c.

Dylan16807 Dec 15, 2017 View on HN

There are so many symbols from different languages that resemble each other. If I use a smiley face, that doesn't mean I used a "ü" or a "ツ" from another alphabet just because it looks similar. A backwards R is visually the same as a Cyrillic character, but that doesn't mean I'm writing in Cyrillic, just like a "P" is visually the same as a Cyrillic character but doesn't mean I'm writing in Cyrillic.

jacob019 May 20, 2024 View on HN

Yes, but she uses different glyphs depending on which letters are next to each other, not sure if that is supported.