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 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.
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father
work
Note that the ninth line is used for ‘desenders’ only (for lack of a better word) and can be left out for creation of the screen font.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@proedie To match the scribble to the transcription, consider that it's written right-to-left. In the very beginning, the signs for 'g' and 'ꜣ' are stacked, top to bottom, and this happens again at the fourth position from the right.
As far as I can tell, two-character stacks were common, but the hieroglyph system's other mechanisms for arranging characters into squares appear to have fallen out of use.
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To be honest I do not know how many pins, I have heard of 24 pins. I thought mine was a 6 or 9 pin printer, but I got mixed up trying to remember
The one I have is a Epson FX-100 given to me by a relative maybe 25 years ago. So I did a search. It replaced a Wang 80 col dot-matrix which I gave to another relative, that Wang Printer is now gone
Interesting enough, seems epson still makes dot-matrix printers.
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@jmcunx Yep. Dot matrix printers are highly reliable, long-lasting, and unlike inkjet or laser printers, can print through triplicate forms. They're common in banking, medicine, and some types of government bureaucracies.
Which is pretty annoying, because that makes them one kind of #retrocomputing hardware whose prices aren't going down.
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@proedie Btw, most dot matrix printers except the very earliest ones could happily place dots at the horizontal half-points, and often used this to make slight curves or slants in letterforms. Here's some examples from the Amstrad DMP3160:
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@riley I am aware of that, I just don’t know how to do that with emojis.
This:
Could probably be more like this:
But I don’t know the widths of the space character on your app or browser. So, maybe this looks like crap for you or others.
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@proedie I can see it fine.