Turning English Words into Symbols and Glyphs

[vastencn]

Hi Everyone.

I posted about a year back about Dscript, but have added quite few updates and additions.

Dscript can be thought of as a "form of English cursive writing". It merges Chinese pen strokes and character design principles wit the roman alphabet, allowing English word to come as close as possible to a logographic representation without loosing the actual letters and words(like Chinese characters).

I have put it all online, and reserve no license, royalty, fee rights. Do as you please, just dont claim you invented Dscript itself.

I recently started adding some "Dscript lessons", these are bassicly little sketches where I outline the actual process of the letter combination like in the image below.
www.dscript.ca/lesson






There is also the full manual (available in online version and pdf download)
www.dscript.ca
This teaches all the basic skills and the letter combinations. It is a guide and index for using Dscript to make symbols and glyphs out of English words.
Learning to write Dscript can produce tons of different styles and looks. Below is a simple example with a basic pen.



Finally there is also a generator, it generates Dscipt text from your input text. There are sooo many possible combinations that I could only put the most common in the generator. It is far from perfect, and much less attractive than human hand written, but it can be fun and shows off the basics of Dscript.
Dscript Generator
www.dscript.ca/genpage.php

I would love any comments suggestions. I am thinking game designers and game artists may find it fun.

It's like a giant puzzle game, the letters are the pieces and they can put together in many ways while always maintaining alphabetical and sequence integrity.

Anyways, hope you find it fun and useful,

Kindest regards,
Vatsen

[Thriff]

Hey Vast,

Very cool!

Seriously, well done. The generator was useful.

I'd love to see you bind this impressive resource to... a setting perhaps?

T

[Kyle Van Pelt]

Excellent stuff. I'm highly impressed with the generator page.

One wonders how to potentially create a runic magic system from this.

[Ron Edwards]

That is totally weird. I'm sort of liking it.

The usual Forge rules for images (i.e., none) are waived for purposes of the existing post only. No more, though, please.

Best, Ron

[vastencn]

Thanks Ron !

I really appreciate it. I live in China and let's just say most people over here think I'm a lunatic if I start drawing and explaining Dscript.

And to top it all off, China recently blocked dscript (I have multiple sites on the same box, and the others are still fine, they defiantly singled it out).

Biggest problem is my current VPN doesn't do FTP, and it breaks connection everytime I login to my wordpress for the lesson page or the file manager in my cpanel.

Basically I'm cut off from it now, a forum like this is pretty much one of my only venues left to share/discuss it.

No more pics, i swear.

.....

As per tying it to a setting, I can imagine several possible setting it would fit in. Unfortunately I am pretty busy with work, and don't really have the artistic skills needed. Feel free to whatever you please with it. I can give you whatever resources and files I have to help.

....

Runic system...

AWESOME IDEA. that one i have never thought about, but by combining runes you combine the individual symbols of the runes as well, which are dscript, and thus continue spelling longer and longer words or sentences

very cool idea.

....

Finally, I myself am not in a position to take this to the next level. That's why i posted it here

I can barely update my own site at the moment.(for lack of time and connectivity)

Anyone who wants to do something it is welcome to do so. I can help by sketching out text and scanning/sending it to you.

If you wanna build you own themed site with an index like dscript.ca, I will zip up all the php and images and send it to you, including the generator.

[Aisha Bennett]

Hey

Your ideas are really great. The converter is even awesome. Its a really tough job which you have done. I know it needs a lot of patience and imagination. This reminds me about the hieroglyphs, I don't whether you know about this. Its actually about the Egyptian script. I also tried to learn it, but it was very difficult to do. So I left it. There is a site http://mcsp.wartburg.edu/breutzmann/CS120/hieroglyphs.html which has some information about transliterating English to Egyptian script. I think this site would help you in the development process.
But I would definitely say again: Great work. Good Luck!!!!

[vastencn]

Thanks

I have added a whole bunch of youtube videos and update the website

the videos are in the youtube chanel "freedscript"

https://www.youtube.com/user/freedscript/videos

even added a Base 100 number system and a bunch more stuff to the main website
http://dscript.ca