How many pins would a matrix printer's head need in order to be able to print legible Demotic? on a single pass :blobcatthinking:
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@proedie How do you figure?
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@riley I don’t pretend to know anything about demotic; I just looked it up in the Wikipedia. But at first glance the symbol for h̭ looked like the most complicated one (on the y axis), and I guess that can be easily recreated in a rough pixel font as:
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I had to look up Demotic, it is an old Egyptian script kind of like Arabic.
I would say 24, which IIRC is what high-end dot-matrix printers came with. From pictures I saw, looks like these can have narrow and thick lines.
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@proedie Er, I kind of suspect you only looked at the proto-alphabet. Demotic had one of these, but unlike modern alphabetic scripts, the alphabet wasn't the full set of characters needed to write it; there's a whole bunch of semantic and grammatic particles still in use, and these need to be representable.
Five pins might be able to get the job done for Coptic, though, which was unicameral, all-uppercase, and built on a version of the Greek alphabet that had settled down to a neat and simple script over centuries of active use.
Consider this Demotic word, for an example. It's transliterated as 'gꜣlꜣgꜣntsy', where ꜣ represents the Egyptian analogue of the Aramaic/Hebrew aleph, and it means copper sulphate. I don't think it can be recognisably represented using only five rows of pixels.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@proedie What a lazy professor, instead of typesetting the Demotic examples, he just scribbled them in, using a proud doctor's hand. :blobcattilt:
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@proedie Er ...
I joke, but he's actually a surgeon. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Leonardo-Caldas-Vieira
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@jmcunx No, it's the newest form of the Egyptian writing system. It still follows the same basic theory that got started with the hieroglyphs, but it has become much cursivised, and somewhat simplified over millennia.
After Demotic, Egyptians kind of gave up on the old ideas of how writing should work, and just adopted an alphabet, giving rise to Coptic. But by that time, Greek influence was so strong on literary Egyptian, that Coptic is probably best considered not just a new writing system for the old language, but as a new language with its own new writing system.
Arabic arrived in Egypt many centuries after the rise of Coptic.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@jmcunx Could 12 pins, at, say, the classic 72 pins per inch, suffice?
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Maybe, I have a 12 bin dot-matrix, but I need to hook it up. The desktop I had it connected to died few years ago.
All I have is a couple of laptops, I bought a converter from Parallel to USB, but have not tried it yet. FWIW it is my only printer, but I have really no need to print anything these days.
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@riley Oh, I see. Hmm. If you put two symbols on top of each other like diacritics, I guess my system would still work, you just need two printer lines for one line of text.
But I admit that’s neither good nor an answer to your original question.
What is the amount of valid symbol combinations? I guess, encoding might be the bottleneck in retro computing.
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@riley Okay, I found this: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Das_Buch_der_Schrift_(Faulmann)_051.jpg
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Das_Buch_der_Schrift_(Faulmann)_052.jpgI can still do it in six lines:
(rp)
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@riley This is fun, though.
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@proedie I'm not sure. They can sometimes be stacked, too, but less eagerly than hieroglyphs can.
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@proedie This is better than just the alphabet that's most commonly presented, but it's still alphabetically biased, and seems to be missing things like the cartouche-brackets, such as were remaining in the cursive usage, and it seems to me that they're also missing a number of determinatives. I'm not quite sure, because it seems that Egyptian used determinatives differently from the Sumerian/Akkadian scribal practice, and I'm not quite sure I understand how determinatives worked in Demotic. Unicode not supporting Demotic doesn't make this any easier.
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@proedie FWIW, eight pins was quite rare in real life. There were a couple of printers that did this, on the premise that it would allow the eight pins to be driven easily by a 8-bit microcontroller, but the common dot matrix printers had 9 pins, on the premise that five would correspond to the ex-height, two pins allow for ascenders, and two for descenders.
But Demotic doesn't have ascenders or descenders the way European minuscule scripts did, which means, using either seven or even all nine just for the main characters wouldn't be an issue. I think Egyptians didn't even do baselines the way we do.
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@proedie Well ...
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by [email protected]
@proedie Actually, that might be representative. This is what a genuine receipt from the Oxyrhynchus dump looked like (it's Oxyrhynchus Papyrus Number 310):
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@proedie Ooh, a doctor's note!
This is Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 52, and apparently certifies that the patient, identified as the daughter of one Aurelius Dioscorus, was suffering from wounds caused by her house falling down. I'm not fully positive that it's written in Demotic Egyptian, though; the handwriting is so messy that I'm not sure that it is not just cursive Greek, and I don't see strong tell-tale signs of Demotic Egyptian in it (but they might have become old-fashioned by 325 CE due to Greek alphabet's influence).
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@jmcunx What's its name? I haven't heard of a 12-pin one before, so I'm curious.