If you follow the author's link and download the font, there are three separate available fonts: Ivo_Lvl1-Normal.otf, Ivo_Lvl2-Normal.otf and Ivo_Lvl3-Normal.otf.
The graphic you linked to is rendered in Ivo_Lvl3-Normal.otf.
Thanks, though if true, what paragraphs is the author talking about?
Generally speaking, I'm trying to understand what the "power of context" means to the author - and assuming this example explains; though it's possible it does not.
I'm guessing he means "you wouldn't be able to read these wacky characters in isolation, but in a body of text you can infer which Latin character each represents".
In the case of a human attempting to read his text, the context could be considered to include semantic hints, knowing how many letters are in the current word, etc.
Edit: The paragraphs he refers to may be those rendered in italics in the preceding section of the article, but their content is not important in any case.
Unclear how this font in question addressed any real issues though; interested in the topic though, since I'm not aware on any science-based font system.
The designer Phil Baines used a strategy of subtracting elements from each character to design a difficult-but-possible-to-read font in the 90s called You Can Read Me. It was actually inspired by an experiment by Brian Coe which was reproduced in a book from 1968 called The Visible Word by Herbert Spencer. You get the idea--the development of typefaces is quite a slow moving activity which owes a lot to the subjective judgements of idiosyncratic personalities, usually male. Over the last century there has been a minority of practitioners who strive for scientific rigor, though.
"[The Visible Word] is a major contribution to legibility studies and presents a summary of over one hundred years’ worth of investigations by one of the UK’s most influential typographers. Spencers extraordinarily detailed 24 page bibliography is testimony to his investigation. The visible word is part of a programme of research into the readability of print in information publishing. In this book legibility is explored with equal thoroughness and objectivity. Resulting in the fact that people read most easily the kind of lettering they are used to. Although this may seem obvious in todays comprehensive documentation of the topic, much was learned from his lucid demonstration."
http://www.designers-books.com/the-visible-word-herbert-spen...
I'm not sure where to find "today's comprehensive documentation" of legibility and I suspect that it is a little tedious and empirical...
But as an example, here's some more up-to-date research+bibliography in this article:
Typography to me injects bias that I largely see as artifacts of the past; your comment that people read lettering best that they know speaks to this.
Closet I've seen to research I more interested in was a grid of pixels randomly configured, displayed to the user for them to recall, hidden, them compared to what the user was able to recall. Study found that patterns on the borders of the grid were more likely to be recalled.
Thanks for sharing all the info and links, I look forward to digging into them.
Before reading these HN comments, I forwarded the article to my wife, saying effectively "I was amazed that I was able to read the paragraph of whacky text in Ivo font, even as, after reading it, I went back to look at the font and then realized I couldn't read individual words or letters!"
Interestingly when I went to Beijing recently I was pleasantly surprised at the absence of noisy gardening machines. The streets were much cleaner there and the landscaping noticeably better. I think I want to move there now.
Coming back to the US I feel like this is a poor third-world country now.
Actually, of the the examples mentioned in the article, I preferred the text the Bad Quarto over the Folio.
For instance the reversal of roles between the sentinels in the opening scene appeals to me. Somehow it evokes memories of myriad times I was tasked with some nonsensical assignment that was hard to take seriously. I can imagine being the sentinel on duty, perhaps sitting down and reading a book rather than being on the lookout.
I am a software developer and "technical user". I don't care about new features. I tried switching from OO to LO and my experience was that it is full of bugs and not 100% compatible with my existing corpus of OO diles. I'll be sticking with OO thank you.
I played around with it, and didn't see any advantage over using git commands.
Then I tried pushing a change. I was expecting some confirmation on what refspec to use... but no! Magit pushed my change directly to refs/heads instead of refs/for, completely bypassing gerrit code review.
I got burned. That was it; I'm never using Magit again.
I tried installing TextSecure recently but it wouldn't work without the Google Play services.
I hadn't herd of their new app Signal. Has anyone tried it? I'm really interested in hearing anyone's experience using it.
BTW, I ended up installing Telegram ...and it may be mere co-incidence, but I started noticing some weird things happening that I've never seen before. I connect to the internet exclusively via tethering to my phone and while tethered I started seeing messages in Firefox from my desktop machine giving warnings that were something like "Could not establish secure connection because the server supports a higher version of TLS". My guess is that it was some sort of MITM attack... and I was possibly targeted due to the traffic to Telegram servers.
One other thing regarding Telegram: I really don't like that it reads my contact list and uploads it to their server to check if my contacts have a Telegram account. I've blocked the permission for now.
Telegram isn't secure. There's been no public audit of their "secure" code and most messages aren't even sent via the secure channel unless you expressly tell it to do so.
It has a pretty UI though, so most people seem to think it's great.
I had the same experience. I am using CyanogenMod as well and as much as I dislike Google I did install the Play services. I can't even remember why but I think I needed it to use the google voice app.
Anyway, google play apparently tried to auto-update and bricked itself; now it just says "no connection" when I launch the play store.
Last week I tried to install TestSecure but it would not run. It just gave an error message about needing to update play services.
I ended up installing the Telegram app in F-Droid.
[1]Clinton Slams Obama for Voting “for” the PATRIOT Act at ABC-Facebook New Hampshire Debate - https://www.wired.com/2008/01/clinton-slams-o/