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.

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#407
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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.