RE: [svg-developers] canonical expressions -- part 3: more efficient ways of packing text into rectangles
Wow! Very interesting papers Jake! I'm very interested in visual languages and am pleased to know that there has been some work done in this area -- and it is strong-looking work as well! One other vaguely related thing (but not so formally presented) was this from SVG Open 2007: SVG Pictograms with Natural Language Based and Semantic Information by Kazunari ITO et al available at http://www.svgopen.org/2007/papers/SVGOpen2007abstract/index.html -- they were sort of interested in making a language (that would be cross-culturally readable) out of juxtapositions and animations of familiar icons (there are remarkably many in international usage already). Thanks for the references Jake, I'm intrigued. David From: svg-developers@yahoogroups.com [mailto:svg-develop...@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Jacob Beard Sent: Monday, November 08, 2010 4:20 AM To: svg-developers@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [svg-developers] canonical expressions -- part 3: more efficient ways of packing text into rectangles On 10-11-08 06:07 AM, ddailey wrote: The concept of how best to write something got me wondering about the following. Using an alphabet or a syllabary (like most of the languages of the world excepting Chinese, Japanese, Mayan, and a few hundred others) how much space does it take to convey our meaning.* Here's the question: if we relax the rules of English orthography just a bit, so that instead of writing from left to write, we write from left to right, or downward, or inward (by allowing glyphs to be inside one another) , can we write legibly in less space? http://granite.sru.edu/~ddailey/svg/canonical.svg http://granite.sru.edu/%7Eddailey/svg/canonical.svg This link shows a way of packing letters into a space under the relaxed rules of right-or-down-or-inside. If we confine legibility by some empirically defined threshold on the minimum size of a glyph, then if we allow physics to constrain the two dimensional placement of our glyphs, subject to rotation scaling and translation, to pack tightly, then can we find ways of expressing English (or another language using some alphabet) using less space than by writing simply unidirectionally? That's pretty interesting. I think there's a bit of work from the field of visual modelling that might be useful and relevant here. For one thing, it would probably be useful to formally define a notion of insideness in the language definition of your graphical language (the abstract syntax of the concrete syntax, in use modelling parlance). In your language definition, you would probably say that each glyph may have some region in which other glyphs may be placed, and that doing so has some relation to the abstract syntax, or the structure of the language. You may also define some constraints in terms of layout in the language definition. You can see some similar work has been done here: http://msdl.cs.mcgill.ca/people/hv/teaching/MSBDesign/notes.ClassificationFrameworkVisualLanguages.pdf The author discusses classes of visual language, including geometry-based languages, in which the meaning of the relationships between elements is primarily expressed in terms of their geometric properties (e.g. position relative to one another in the coordinate system, but I suppose this could be generalized). This includes a formal notion of insideness (see page 10, definition of ULinclude). Once you have formally defined the notion of insideness for your language, and have defined the special inside region for each element of your language (each glyph), and the special relationships between each element in the language, then it may be possible to begin applying existing layout algorithms, again perhaps from the domain of visual modelling languages. I'm thinking Harel's paper An algorithm for blob hierarchy layout, while not completely relevant, might be an interesting place to start as a model for examining the efficacy of a particular layout for a particular graphical language: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=345240 There would be many ways of analyzing such algorithms, including usability/readability, and space-efficiency. Jake [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] - To unsubscribe send a message to: svg-developers-unsubscr...@yahoogroups.com -or- visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers and click edit my membership Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/ * Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional * To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/join (Yahoo! ID required) * To change settings via email: svg-developers-dig...@yahoogroups.com svg-developers-fullfeatu...@yahoogroups.com * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: svg-developers-unsubscr
Re: [svg-developers] canonical expressions -- part 3: more efficient ways of packing text into rectangles
On 10-11-08 06:07 AM, ddailey wrote: The concept of how best to write something got me wondering about the following. Using an alphabet or a syllabary (like most of the languages of the world excepting Chinese, Japanese, Mayan, and a few hundred others) how much space does it take to convey our meaning.* Here's the question: if we relax the rules of English orthography just a bit, so that instead of writing from left to write, we write from left to right, or downward, or inward (by allowing glyphs to be inside one another) , can we write legibly in less space? http://granite.sru.edu/~ddailey/svg/canonical.svg http://granite.sru.edu/%7Eddailey/svg/canonical.svg This link shows a way of packing letters into a space under the relaxed rules of right-or-down-or-inside. If we confine legibility by some empirically defined threshold on the minimum size of a glyph, then if we allow physics to constrain the two dimensional placement of our glyphs, subject to rotation scaling and translation, to pack tightly, then can we find ways of expressing English (or another language using some alphabet) using less space than by writing simply unidirectionally? That's pretty interesting. I think there's a bit of work from the field of visual modelling that might be useful and relevant here. For one thing, it would probably be useful to formally define a notion of insideness in the language definition of your graphical language (the abstract syntax of the concrete syntax, in use modelling parlance). In your language definition, you would probably say that each glyph may have some region in which other glyphs may be placed, and that doing so has some relation to the abstract syntax, or the structure of the language. You may also define some constraints in terms of layout in the language definition. You can see some similar work has been done here: http://msdl.cs.mcgill.ca/people/hv/teaching/MSBDesign/notes.ClassificationFrameworkVisualLanguages.pdf The author discusses classes of visual language, including geometry-based languages, in which the meaning of the relationships between elements is primarily expressed in terms of their geometric properties (e.g. position relative to one another in the coordinate system, but I suppose this could be generalized). This includes a formal notion of insideness (see page 10, definition of ULinclude). Once you have formally defined the notion of insideness for your language, and have defined the special inside region for each element of your language (each glyph), and the special relationships between each element in the language, then it may be possible to begin applying existing layout algorithms, again perhaps from the domain of visual modelling languages. I'm thinking Harel's paper An algorithm for blob hierarchy layout, while not completely relevant, might be an interesting place to start as a model for examining the efficacy of a particular layout for a particular graphical language: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=345240 There would be many ways of analyzing such algorithms, including usability/readability, and space-efficiency. Jake [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] - To unsubscribe send a message to: svg-developers-unsubscr...@yahoogroups.com -or- visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers and click edit my membership Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/ * Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional * To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/join (Yahoo! ID required) * To change settings via email: svg-developers-dig...@yahoogroups.com svg-developers-fullfeatu...@yahoogroups.com * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: svg-developers-unsubscr...@yahoogroups.com * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
Re: [svg-developers] canonical expressions -- part 3: more efficient ways of packing text into rectangles
The concept of how best to write something got me wondering about the following. Using an alphabet or a syllabary (like most of the languages of the world excepting Chinese, Japanese, Mayan, and a few hundred others) how much space does it take to convey our meaning.* Here's the question: if we relax the rules of English orthography just a bit, so that instead of writing from left to write, we write from left to right, or downward, or inward (by allowing glyphs to be inside one another) , can we write legibly in less space? http://granite.sru.edu/~ddailey/svg/canonical.svg This link shows a way of packing letters into a space under the relaxed rules of right-or-down-or-inside. If we confine legibility by some empirically defined threshold on the minimum size of a glyph, then if we allow physics to constrain the two dimensional placement of our glyphs, subject to rotation scaling and translation, to pack tightly, then can we find ways of expressing English (or another language using some alphabet) using less space than by writing simply unidirectionally? Vincent Hardy's work with cameras at http://svg-wow.org/blog/2010/08/14/camera/ reinforces this idea that writing need not be unidirectional. And from many languages we know that it need not be. By what grammar might we guide the maximization of our expressiveness per unit of space and time? cheers David * As a kid I subscribed to Quino Lingo and observed that English took up far less room, on average, that French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, German, Latin or Basque. I studied Navajo as a big kid and can testify that it takes up *room* to write it, though not so extravagantly as most languages. Chinese seems to be quite effective. - Original Message - From: ddailey To: svg-developers@yahoogroups.com Sent: Sunday, November 07, 2010 11:31 PM Subject: Re: [svg-developers] canonical expressions -- part 2: A challenge: accessbility and symbols of the public domain (wikipedia) Challenge: come up with better symbols for signifying public domain or copyright free. Begin here http://granite.sru.edu/~ddailey/svg/pd3.svg . Look at the source code and then see what you think. I'll get back to that example toward the end of this message. As a bit of searching in Google Images*, Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons will reveal, there are several symbols meant to depict the concepts of copyright free or public domain or copyleft. Not only do these concepts have slightly different nuances of meaning, but the symbols have a many-to-many relationship with the concepts. And furthermore, the symbols have differential levels of accessibity, depending on for whom we define making allowing or enabling to be accessible. And, many of the symbols, while looking alike, have very different underlying file structure. Following a recent visit to openclipart.org** I was rather prepared for what Jeff Schiller calls cruft when I saw the earlier image at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Publicdomain.svg as described there.I did the following [Hand edited to remove sodipodi and inkscape references, remove unused gradients, remove unused styles, replaced duplicated paths by use elements, simplified complex cubic beziers as simple arc subcommands; used integer arithmetic. Replaced complex arcs by circles. New file is 18 (lkb) lines of code -- old file was 144 lines (5kb). New file should have better semantics for re-editing basic objects.] Well 18 lines and 895 bytes defintely seems better than 5 kilobytes of code. But is the new code more accessible? Well, I think it is, but how can I tell for sure? How does one come up with the best expression for such a simple figure? Look inside the two figures and you'll see several questions that pose themselves: is it better to use use? does striking all the sodipodi stuff erase some of the artist's brushstrokes?*** are two paths with one rotating the other better than one that has twice as coordinates listed? doesn't it make more sense to let color be inherited from the group rather than individually defined for each path? what about the optical illusion of the letters pd for public domain? Should that be made semantic in our markup? I confess it took me a while of fidding to replace all those cubic beziers from Inkscape by the canonical arc-equivalents. But I figure that the seven coordinates (or so) that I used, instead of sixty or so in the original path ought to make the content more accessible to future analysists if anyone ever wants to modify it! Next question (and maybe more important): Take a look at http://granite.sru.edu/~ddailey/svg/pd3.svg The image on the left is one of the current images served by wikimedia as the symbol for copyright free.[2] Perhaps it is based on [3] . Perhaps the metadata associated with the file should show its ancestry? The file history shows some well-deserved attempt to rid the
