bugUnifont - Bugs: bug #51544, International chemical symbols in...

 
 

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bug #51544: International chemical symbols in Pikto

Submitter:  David Corbett <dscorbett>
Submitted:  Sun 23 Jul 2017 03:57:08 AM UTC
   
 
Category:  None Severity:  3 - Normal
Item Group:  None Status:  Works For Me
Privacy:  Public Assigned to:  unifoundry
Open/Closed:  Closed

Sat 05 Aug 2017 08:52:26 PM UTC, comment #5: 

David,

For the reasons discussed below, I am going to leave this as is. The three of us who created the Pikto block spent a lot of time deliberating this same topic. There is no perfect solution. I think that Pikto's creator did not realize the full implications of what he suggested, and unfortunately he gave no further detail in his books, both of which Andrew Miller and I have examined.

Thanks,


Paul Hardy

Paul Hardy <unifoundry>
Group administrator
Sun 23 Jul 2017 11:49:22 PM UTC, comment #4: 

David,

It is possible, but another aspect of this is that a lot more people will recognize what "borax" is than would recognize a complicated molecular formula. So I would like to leave things as they are.

Pikto's creator was an artist. It is possible he did not realize the complexity of the chemical notation for all of the chemicals that he identified--that it was left up in the air on purpose, to be resolved later. Pikto is missing some rigor in other areas as well (such as not giving English definitions for all of the Pikto glyphs in his 35,000 Pikto-English dictionary, or--off the top of my head--inconsistent use of a caret as an adjective modifier of a noun). Still, it was very obviously a labor of love (or a "labour" of love) for him to hand set the type for two books on a manual press.


Paul Hardy

Paul Hardy <unifoundry>
Group administrator
Sun 23 Jul 2017 09:37:00 PM UTC, comment #3: 

Are they impossible to fit in a 16×32 grid? Borax could for example be 00000000480180C0680141205B9D952E4A8555224B5D9CC400100404001C04040000000001392060034D20900955EE900165229001392E600000080000000E00.

David Corbett <dscorbett>
Sun 23 Jul 2017 08:50:18 PM UTC, comment #2: 

David,

Incidentally in case you notice it, John Edward Williams was British and his writings therefore used British spelling conventions. So the Pikto table on the Unifoundry site uses British spelling in deference to Pikto's creator, whereas the rest of the Unifoundry site uses American English spelling.


Paul Hardy

Paul Hardy <unifoundry>
Group administrator
Sun 23 Jul 2017 08:41:31 PM UTC, comment #1: 

David,

Here is some background on how the Pikto symbols came to be in Unifont.

Andrew Miller got a copy of the Pikto book in England, scanned the 880 glyphs, and put them in the Pikto CSUR range in the order they appeared. Based upon that arrangement, Johnnie Weaver and I drew the glyphs for Pikto. You'll notice that the CSUR assigns far more glyphs to Pikto than what we used; Michael Everson must not have had a copy of the Pikto book, going on broad statements about Pikto that appeared elsewhere.

I had been trying for quite a while to get a copy of the Pikto book and finally got one. (I am in California, and Andrew is in England, so I wasn't able to just look through his book at the explanatory information and other background in it). After getting a copy of the book myself, and also getting the Pikto-English Dictionary book, I adjusted a lot of the glyphs.

I also at that point wrote the predecessor to the utility unifont1per, so I could create the Pikto table at http://unifoundry.com/pikto/. I later generalized that code to work for different Unicode ranges and wrote documentation so I could release unifont1per as part of the Unifont package

We spent some time guessing at deciphering graphical components of Pikto glyphs where the artist, John Edward Williams, did not provide details, and also on some Pikto-to-English translations. Although he created a Pikto-English dictionary, he did not give English meanings for all 880 of his Pikto ideographs in it. That is why the Pikto table on the unifoundry site contains guesses.

On the (K) glyphs, we thought at first that we would draw out the molecular formulas, just as you mentioned. But some chemicals were going to be impossible to fit in a 16-by-16 pixel grid. On top of that, there are two molecules possible for Borax, and they are both very long (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borax).

So after a fair amount of discussion about this very topic, the three of us (Andrew, Johnnie, and I) decided to leave those glyphs as "(K)" symbols, drawn to try to match the way each one was drawn in the original. That way they reflect the spirit of Pikto's creator to some extent, and someone could list the chemical formula after if they wanted, or substitute it for the "(K)" symbol. Unfortunately, John Williams gave no insight in his writings into how he expected those to be written in running text. It seems he just identified those chemicals as being fundamental to contemporary human discourse.

Thus, I think the best solution is to leave the Pikto glyphs as they are.


Paul Hardy

Paul Hardy <unifoundry>
Group administrator
Sun 23 Jul 2017 03:57:08 AM UTC, original submission:  

According to http://unifoundry.com/pikto/index.html, the various Pikto glyphs for chemicals are marked (K) to indicate “the letters and numbers in current international usage”. In Unifont Upper, they all literally look like “(K)” instead of chemical symbols. Shouldn’t AMONIA, for example, look like “NH₃”?

David Corbett <dscorbett>

 

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    Date Changed by Updated Field Previous Value => Replaced by
    2017-08-05 unifoundry StatusNone Works For Me
        Assigned toNone unifoundry
        Open/ClosedOpen Closed

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