Carving Text at Its Joints: A New Perspective on Writing and Computers
summary
Argues that much script complexity is extrinsic and fixes come from new abstractions: a concrete Teleode encoding (ordered labeled entry trees, base characters + attributes, self‑normalizing) and a programmable typography runtime called Dubsar engine (stack bytecode, scribe‑beam handlers, stroke‑based glyphs). Demonstrations include a working Maya font and Latin/Her-shey adaptations, no kerning tables (contextual placement instead), claimed compactness for large sets (CJK), UTF‑8‑like indexing of graphemes, and a usable prototype still under active development.
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chapters (14)
- 0:00Text handling challenges
- 3:32Key terms in writing systems
- 4:14Maya script for text systems
- 8:08Myths about computer text
- 15:10Writing direction complexity
- 15:33Unicode plain text critiques
- 20:50Structured text encoding
- 21:54Teleode encoding scheme
- 24:26Fonts as programs
- 25:49Dubsar typography engine
- 29:42Maya script rendering
- 30:48Unicode replacement or improvement
- 31:51Future work and release
- 32:16Q&A
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