Alphabet Soup is a project which attempts to determine a number of things about the shapes of letters in several different writing systems. First, it hypothesizes a set of basic building blocks that all letters are built up from. Second, it hypothesizes a set of rules, a grammar or syntax, which defines how those pieces combine to make different letters. The project will eventually include the letters in the Roman alphabet, upper and lower case Arabic numbers, the Cyrillic alphabet, the International Phonetic Alphabet, and much of the uppercase Greek alphabet. It currently has the capability to generate 2,099,776 letter-like symbols, most of which are not in any alphabet, although they look quite plausible. Alphabet Soup is implemented in a computer program which uses the building blocks and grammar to do several things. It can generate individual letters. It can take a input string and randomly vary the letters, producing a string which is readable but strange looking. Or it can generate random strings of symbols. The program includes an optical kerning algorithm to ensure that the letters are kerned sensibly.
by
jstone
2006-11-03 16:40
typography
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language
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generative
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digital.art
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tools
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free
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open.source
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python
simpy
