Regarding cultural appropriation, I’d like to put in my two cents too: as a Hungarian, I have seen old Hungarian used in various… interesting ways. I didn’t mind, I smiled, and thought it fun, to see it used as if it had no meaning. It gave the runes a bit more of an ancient feel, as if they were undeciphered. An air of mystique.
Because of this, I personally, don’t mind neither Bamum nor Mende, because I’ve been on the other end, and didn’t mind it, either. (I can read and write/etch the Old Hungarian runes, by the way, it’s fun.)
First, there are still a bunch of simpler glyphs that could replace the more complex ones. But we could do more extensive changes, as well (e.g. replacing four lines with three so we can make the lines thicker without shrinking the gaps between them). It’s not as if the glyphs I copied from the Unicode docs are an exact match for the ones carved into rock 3,500 years ago; we can make whatever changes we want to simplify and stylize them. It’s not even that difficult — it’s just time-consuming. I’ll see if I can find the time today to experiment and show some examples of simplifying/stylizing some of the symbols. When I’ve got a few done, I’ll post them here.
@jesse, if you have the time (I know what it’s like to have a newborn), it would help if I had a better idea of a line width to try for, and also the maximum size possible (avoiding the center bumps on some keys, and keeping the symbols close enough to the LEDs.
Also, the keys are going to be some dark color, correct? And the labels will be translucent white? I don’t recall the details, but I’d like to try reflecting the actual colors a bit better in the SVG.
One more thing: if anyone wants to suggest changes to my Linear A layout (rearranging the keys, removing certain glyphs, adding others from the Unicode chart, altering the glyphs, or changing the style (line width, roundness of endpoints, et cetera)), I’d be happy to update it. I put a bit more thought into setting up the revised version, but not so much that I could explain a reason for all but a few choices I made; I’m not really set on any of it.
@TimNN: can you share an SVG file with a Noto Bamum layout? I want to be able to open it with Inkscape, but the kio.svg file just has garbage in it instead of the text characters when downloaded.
Alternatively, the font size in the CSS is specified as 50px, but I don’t know how to translate that into a point size in my SVG file. Knowing the appropriate point size for the SVG would be enough, though not as nice as getting a real SVG that I can zoom in and edit.
Looking at the current Bamum layout posted on the poll, I noticed that the key that would be ‘Tab’ normally, looks an awful lot like the workiva logo. It also looks a bit too close for to the normal ‘w’, for my tastes. Not sure if this bugs anybody else, but I thought it would be worth pointing out. I’m sure it’s fairly difficult to avoid any of the keys looking like some logo, given how simple a lot of the runic symbols are.
So, it’s better to have rounded ends for the lines in the symbols, rather than square ones?
Consistent line width is easy, but I’ve been wondering if it would be better to have square corners and bevel-joined cusps, fully rounded line ends (and cusps), or slightly-rounded square ends. I can easily do any of the above, but I don’t have strong preferences, so it would be nice to have a good reason to choose one, or at least know how much it matters for quality.
The issue is that the laser is not square, it’s round and as such it can only do round inside corners and the min radius of the laser is the min radius of the corner.
If I understand correctly, the laser is basically being used to remove a layer of dark-colored paint on a translucent keycap, so those inside corners are the outside corners of the symbols. And we don’t know the exact details of the minimum diameter of the laser, so any sharp outside corners are likely to be rounded off slightly, but we can’t predict the exact amount.
That makes me inclined to fully-rounded line ends, which is good because it makes things much simpler for me if I’m redoing the Linear A symbols, and means that those nice crisp corners on some of the Noto Bamum glyphs won’t look quite like they do in the SVG.
If I don’t understand correctly, please let me know.
Hey, @algernon, I think your proposal is currently my favourite of the pack, but I have some suggestions for it:
I noticed that there are some duplicate (as far as I can tell) glyphs. I’m not sure whether they’re on purpose. Maybe you were imagining people would bind these pairs of keys to the same thing, but I don’t think that should be assumed.
The outermost two thumb keys
The innermost two thumb keys
I didn’t look hard for other dupes.
While I like that there’s a scattered feel to the glyphs, I think it would be nice to group some glyphs with a common visual theme for the thumb keys. For example, perhaps put all the glyphs with little circles here? Or all those with dots? I think this would give it the illusion of some kind of purpose, even without giving it meaning. This goes for the others too, come to think of it – @merlin, @adam.ard?
Also, when I try to open the SVG in Inkscape I don’t see any glyphs. Do I need a particular font installed, or where are they? Maybe you can turn them into paths to get around that?
The thumb keys are one of the few spots where I’ve done something deliberate (so far). I put “closed” glyphs on the thumbs, and picked ones that vaguely mirror each other. I don’t know how well I’ve done it, since it’s clearly not that obvious…
I think the inner and outer columns are good ones for this sort of attention, too.
@merlin: I wish I could, but things are sadly not as straight forward (see below), I’ll see what I can do but won’t have time to do so until this evening (CET).
The reason this is not as straight forward is as follows: When I started this small project, I basically just took one of the svg’s posted in this thread (I think a Mende one), moved all the styles and external resources out of the actual svg and then updated the svg using JavaScript. This also means that the 50px came from the original svg. I’ll see about adding a working svg download button to the website, which should give you what you want.
Also, if you have a “nicer” baseline svg, I’ll be glad to update the website to use that one if you send it to me. In the current one, runes are positioned by the following markup, which is not ideal to modify (manually), I think:
@merlin: I added a download button (see here) which should give you a usable svg, as long as you have a font with the bamum characters installed (I tested this with inkscape on OS X). The font size is now also defined as 38pt in a style section of the svg, which seems to be equivalent to the previous 50px. I hope this helps you.
I’ve re-made the glyphs on the right side (and some on the left), simplifying several of them a bit. I’ll get to the rest later, as it becomes easier. I think it looks substantially better now, but I could still replace some of the more complex glyphs with simpler ones. SVG here.
Honestly I don’t know if being able to come up with names for most/all of them is a good thing or a bad thing. I should also point out that I don’t mean any offence by this! Any symbols which I see as something … silly … is probably just me.
But for me, I would much rather lean in the direction of abstract.
