As a USAian and an Old, I learned the Zaner-Bloser script in school - a cursive script that tries to minimize pen lifts, but still has "backtracks" as this article calls them, for j, i, and x. It uses a lot of the same kind of loops that this script uses, just for the simpler problem of joins. The downside of the Zaner-Bloser system, as well as Palmer and anything that derives from Spencerian cursive, is that when written quickly, the loops can make several letters only distinguishable by context (is that a short 'l', or a long 'e'?), and the handwriting of adults becomes pretty unreadable after leaving school.
Since then, I re-taught myself to write with an Italic hand, which has more "backtracks" (for instance, 'e' is two strokes) and fewer joins (you never join from e, o, r, or any letter with a descender), and while my speed has suffered somewhat, everyone who sees my handwriting compliments it.
If your hand cramps while writing, it is because you are holding the pen too tightly, possibly in order to apply too much pressure. This is something that writing with ball-point pens will cause you to do. If you don't want to use a fountain pen, at least try a liquid ink rollerball.
This is the kind of thing that makes cursive painful to read. The `i` and `j` in this script are harder to quickly lex, and the `t` (especially in the `tt` ligature) with the added loop flourish diverges sufficiently from a standard `t` to make it hard to decipher in running text.
In text, as in code, I prefer to optimize for easy reading rather than faster writing.
Huh, I just indirectly learned from this article that the way I write a lower-case "t" in cursive is a Dutch way of doing so (edit: sollniss' comment implies it was a common style in Germany too). A quick search suggests it has been replaced with an English style of "t" in the last decades too.
I wonder if that makes my handwriting harder to read for anyone who isn't Dutch and over 40 years old.
Anyway, just bringing it up because you don't need to lift up your pen to write that kind of "t".
Search for "koordschrift" on https://primarium.info/countries/the-netherlands/ to find the illustration showing how I was taught to write it in the late 80s. It's the letter vaguely shaped like a pine tree.
For anyone interested in optimising this further, orthographic (letter-based) cursive shorthand systems are the answer. I personally only know part of the Melin system[1], but there are variants designed for English as the primary language too. (Melin is of course perfectly usable with English also.)
The flow of a cursive shorthand system is unmatched by anything else. I highly recommend learning enougnh to experience it.
(The drawback with more phonetic systems like Gregg is that one has to learn entirely new ways of spelling words. But normal English spelling is so complicated that tradeoff can be worth it for heavy usage. Orthographic systems often also contain phonetic components, but they tend to be optional extensions that improve efficiency, rather than required like with purely phonetic systems.)
Using the term "backtracking" feels somewhat confusing, because it seems like most of the "fixed" letters they propose use what I would find more intuitively described as backtracking: having to trace back the exact path used to get to a given point in order to get back to a previous point to start drawing a new mark from. I think I'd be less confused by a term like "annotations" for what they're talking about.
Wondering how many people are like me and hate writing in cursive.
I stopped using it right after graduating high school (where it was required), never used in drafts after elementary school, and only ever used normal print letters in the university (and also included TeX commands because I was typesetting lecture notes later and was figuring out the optimal command set on the fly).
Latin Sütterlin (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ausgangsschrift#/media/Datei:S...) has an x without backtracking. At first it looks a bit weird with the two loops, but I think they are exaggerated for didactical reasons. If you train a bit you can make it look like an x by making the loops thinner. Put differently, this is the "opposing c's"-method, without lifting the pen between the two c's.
I like writing in cursive, but I don’t see backtracking as a problem. I backtrack quite a lot in Cyrillic, even in Russian, e.g. I always underline ш and write a line over т (which looks like m) to distinguish them (otherwise they look quite similar, see the famous example лишили лилии — you might want to google it if you haven’t seen it yet). I also normally write д as ∂, which breaks the flow.
Belarusian Cyrillic requires more backtracking: we have і, ў, obligatory ё, apostrophes. Never saw it as a problem.
You may want to look into Sütterlin script. It's a bit harder to learn than standard cursive, but it's very pretty, and a level-0 encryption since few people can read it nowadays.
I really like the result. Especially the i and j with the connected dot. I expected them to look off but they really integrate nicely.
That being said I don't think it is about Cyrillic vs Latin but more about traditional cursive vs modern.
The traditional Latin cursives were all pretty much optimized to be written in one running flow. Kurrent and cursive all come from Latin currere which means running.
Admittedly none of them go as far as connecting the i and j dots but otherwise they are pretty much completely connected. But then again I also never seen anyone writing a word and doing the dots afterwards. With traditional cursive you do your upstroke, lift the pen, place the dot (or short short stroke), reverse and do the downstroke. Lifting the pen yes, backtracking no.
With the connected dots OP's Backtrack-Free Cursive still wins here and I really like that because someone found an optimization to something that already has been optimized for centuries.
It's a fascinating innovation, and I enjoyed the creativity on display in the article. That said, I have never minded the backtracking. For me, it is a feature. Having learned it from childhood, the backtracks happen unconsciously, and in fact, I enjoy how my muscle memory instinctively sends my hand dancing back over the word to supply all the missing dots and crossbars.
The point about interaction with undo in a digital inking app is interesting. Seems like with ML handwriting recognition, we could create a handwriting "text editor" instead of a drawing app that understands the semantic structure of the text and operates at that level instead of the individual stroke level.
I had some friends who worked on this for a while but didn't get far with it. It turns out it's tricky to design a general purpose system that adapts to users' handwriting idiosyncrasies and is fast enough to work in real time with handwriting with sufficient accuracy.
Some of that work is still visible in the ChromeOS virtual keyboard handwriting mode, but it's very limited - one line at a time. https://cursive.apps.chrome/ (the built-in note-taking app on Chromebooks) has some interesting inking gestures for manipulating written words, but doesn't have any semantic-level understanding.
I don't cross ts either, I tested out on a piece of paper and what I do is a vertical (slightly curved) stroke, loop to the left, cross the stroke and then a downwards stroke.
I tried the jitter example and instinctively I dotted the j but not the i for some reason. Would love to see some research on this.
I really miss cursive honestly, at least for me I feel a much closer connection to the writing than when typing.
I am not sure what country the author is in, because when I learned to write English in school (decades ago, and it was the language of instruction) very few letters required backtrack, pretty much only ‘i’ and ‘j’. I just looked at an image of the US Declaration of Independence and the same is true (the ‘t’ has a wiggle in the middle).
Other languages are similar: for German if you look at either Kurrent or Sütterlin really only i gets special treatment. The umlauts are given as two dots in examples, but when i read letters and other informal documents they usually end up being a bar.
I like the connected dot for i and j! Clever, and i will try to adopt it. Most of my handwritten writing these days is for myself.
I also use backtrack-free cursive too for my own personal notes, by not dotting i, j, and just not stopping to press pen when moving to dash t.
One problem I had was that dotless i tended to blend in with neighboring characters, e.g. "in" looked like "m", "ij" looked like "y". I solved that by elongating "i" downwards. This made it unintelligible for other people, so I only use it in my own personal notes.
I have had similar thoughts recently when attending language courses where I write a lot of notes by hand. This problem is exacerbated by umlauts. If the language doesn't have letters like ō (are there any? i only see this letter to represent a sound, never in a word), then the two dots can be replaced with a line and so, I guess, the lowercase T technique from the blog post could be adapted to it. I think I know what I am gonna do after work today
Really nice article (& website). This goes into my scrapbook.
Still use cursive after 60 years, though nowadays, less on paper, and more using Gboard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gboard). (It reads my handwriting better than I can, but I still keep looking for something better.)
As a guy who writes software for a living, I rarely put pen or pencil to paper. I type out everything, and print it if I need it. I have nice and simple note taking and list making sites for myself on the www, so that takes care of a lot of what people write for. I am odd, though, in the fact that I LOVE a good pen, and I have several nice ones that I never use.
Russian cursive is incredibly hard to read. Since handwriting even more than code is meant to be red, I think prioritising readability over ease of writing is actually acceptable.
I think the old German writing system “current” also has very few pen lifts, but reading that stuff gives me a headache.
An italian influencer started speaking in italics/cursive. It's a silly thing, but the thought of pronouncing words differently because they are on bold or italics is interesting
Great article! One perspective I'd like to share is that for me, the joy is mostly found in how beautiful the product is. From that standpoint, I don't particularly care how efficient I am at writing cursive. That said, this is a hand I would be interested to learn.
Try writing this sentence on your cell phone keyboard, if you use a "swipe" type keyboard interface. Fun! (All on the top row, so it is just sliding around on the top):
Usually writing small, in all-caps, except code: in lowercase, and the "t" and "i" retain their lower curve. Cursive is difficult; easy to write, but (later) hard to read.
Can see how penmanship there would be appreciated.
Some of this seems worth adopting. My personal hand already has some modifications to traditional school cursive and I've never liked certain letters maybe because of being left handed.
I never liked writing cursive. Then i tried a fancy pen once and it was so much better. I suspect cheap ballpoint pen killed cursive as much as anything else did.
In the Hotelplan logo, I think they are going straight from the o to the e, with a backtrack to make the downward line in the t. Which is kind of interesting as well.
This is unrelated to the main thesis of the article, but worth pointing out as too many people equate the Cyrillic script with Russian language.
The Cyrillic script was invented in Bulgaria (during the First Bulgarian Empire), and was used to write Bulgarian language, creating a huge literary corpus, long before it began spreading to Kievan Rus. The Russian language itself comes from Old Bulgarian / Old Church Slavonic, as does Serbian and other "Slavic" languages.
And no, Bulgaria was never part of Russia nor the Soviet Union.
As a USAian and an Old, I learned the Zaner-Bloser script in school - a cursive script that tries to minimize pen lifts, but still has "backtracks" as this article calls them, for j, i, and x. It uses a lot of the same kind of loops that this script uses, just for the simpler problem of joins. The downside of the Zaner-Bloser system, as well as Palmer and anything that derives from Spencerian cursive, is that when written quickly, the loops can make several letters only distinguishable by context (is that a short 'l', or a long 'e'?), and the handwriting of adults becomes pretty unreadable after leaving school.
Since then, I re-taught myself to write with an Italic hand, which has more "backtracks" (for instance, 'e' is two strokes) and fewer joins (you never join from e, o, r, or any letter with a descender), and while my speed has suffered somewhat, everyone who sees my handwriting compliments it.
If your hand cramps while writing, it is because you are holding the pen too tightly, possibly in order to apply too much pressure. This is something that writing with ball-point pens will cause you to do. If you don't want to use a fountain pen, at least try a liquid ink rollerball.
This is the kind of thing that makes cursive painful to read. The `i` and `j` in this script are harder to quickly lex, and the `t` (especially in the `tt` ligature) with the added loop flourish diverges sufficiently from a standard `t` to make it hard to decipher in running text.
In text, as in code, I prefer to optimize for easy reading rather than faster writing.
Huh, I just indirectly learned from this article that the way I write a lower-case "t" in cursive is a Dutch way of doing so (edit: sollniss' comment implies it was a common style in Germany too). A quick search suggests it has been replaced with an English style of "t" in the last decades too.
I wonder if that makes my handwriting harder to read for anyone who isn't Dutch and over 40 years old.
Anyway, just bringing it up because you don't need to lift up your pen to write that kind of "t".
Search for "koordschrift" on https://primarium.info/countries/the-netherlands/ to find the illustration showing how I was taught to write it in the late 80s. It's the letter vaguely shaped like a pine tree.
For anyone interested in optimising this further, orthographic (letter-based) cursive shorthand systems are the answer. I personally only know part of the Melin system[1], but there are variants designed for English as the primary language too. (Melin is of course perfectly usable with English also.)
The flow of a cursive shorthand system is unmatched by anything else. I highly recommend learning enougnh to experience it.
(The drawback with more phonetic systems like Gregg is that one has to learn entirely new ways of spelling words. But normal English spelling is so complicated that tradeoff can be worth it for heavy usage. Orthographic systems often also contain phonetic components, but they tend to be optional extensions that improve efficiency, rather than required like with purely phonetic systems.)
[1]: http://melinsstenografi.nu/image/sti-ukast.png
Using the term "backtracking" feels somewhat confusing, because it seems like most of the "fixed" letters they propose use what I would find more intuitively described as backtracking: having to trace back the exact path used to get to a given point in order to get back to a previous point to start drawing a new mark from. I think I'd be less confused by a term like "annotations" for what they're talking about.
Wondering how many people are like me and hate writing in cursive.
I stopped using it right after graduating high school (where it was required), never used in drafts after elementary school, and only ever used normal print letters in the university (and also included TeX commands because I was typesetting lecture notes later and was figuring out the optimal command set on the fly).
Latin Sütterlin (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ausgangsschrift#/media/Datei:S...) has an x without backtracking. At first it looks a bit weird with the two loops, but I think they are exaggerated for didactical reasons. If you train a bit you can make it look like an x by making the loops thinner. Put differently, this is the "opposing c's"-method, without lifting the pen between the two c's.
I like writing in cursive, but I don’t see backtracking as a problem. I backtrack quite a lot in Cyrillic, even in Russian, e.g. I always underline ш and write a line over т (which looks like m) to distinguish them (otherwise they look quite similar, see the famous example лишили лилии — you might want to google it if you haven’t seen it yet). I also normally write д as ∂, which breaks the flow.
Belarusian Cyrillic requires more backtracking: we have і, ў, obligatory ё, apostrophes. Never saw it as a problem.
You may want to look into Sütterlin script. It's a bit harder to learn than standard cursive, but it's very pretty, and a level-0 encryption since few people can read it nowadays.
I really like the result. Especially the i and j with the connected dot. I expected them to look off but they really integrate nicely.
That being said I don't think it is about Cyrillic vs Latin but more about traditional cursive vs modern.
The traditional Latin cursives were all pretty much optimized to be written in one running flow. Kurrent and cursive all come from Latin currere which means running.
Admittedly none of them go as far as connecting the i and j dots but otherwise they are pretty much completely connected. But then again I also never seen anyone writing a word and doing the dots afterwards. With traditional cursive you do your upstroke, lift the pen, place the dot (or short short stroke), reverse and do the downstroke. Lifting the pen yes, backtracking no.
With the connected dots OP's Backtrack-Free Cursive still wins here and I really like that because someone found an optimization to something that already has been optimized for centuries.
You only need 1 backtrack if you do the dots and crosses after you've written the word
The t I've learned in school in the 90s is a single stroke.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulausgangsschrift
It's a fascinating innovation, and I enjoyed the creativity on display in the article. That said, I have never minded the backtracking. For me, it is a feature. Having learned it from childhood, the backtracks happen unconsciously, and in fact, I enjoy how my muscle memory instinctively sends my hand dancing back over the word to supply all the missing dots and crossbars.
The point about interaction with undo in a digital inking app is interesting. Seems like with ML handwriting recognition, we could create a handwriting "text editor" instead of a drawing app that understands the semantic structure of the text and operates at that level instead of the individual stroke level.
I had some friends who worked on this for a while but didn't get far with it. It turns out it's tricky to design a general purpose system that adapts to users' handwriting idiosyncrasies and is fast enough to work in real time with handwriting with sufficient accuracy.
Some of that work is still visible in the ChromeOS virtual keyboard handwriting mode, but it's very limited - one line at a time. https://cursive.apps.chrome/ (the built-in note-taking app on Chromebooks) has some interesting inking gestures for manipulating written words, but doesn't have any semantic-level understanding.
Super interesting article.
I don't cross ts either, I tested out on a piece of paper and what I do is a vertical (slightly curved) stroke, loop to the left, cross the stroke and then a downwards stroke.
I tried the jitter example and instinctively I dotted the j but not the i for some reason. Would love to see some research on this.
I really miss cursive honestly, at least for me I feel a much closer connection to the writing than when typing.
I am not sure what country the author is in, because when I learned to write English in school (decades ago, and it was the language of instruction) very few letters required backtrack, pretty much only ‘i’ and ‘j’. I just looked at an image of the US Declaration of Independence and the same is true (the ‘t’ has a wiggle in the middle).
Other languages are similar: for German if you look at either Kurrent or Sütterlin really only i gets special treatment. The umlauts are given as two dots in examples, but when i read letters and other informal documents they usually end up being a bar.
I like the connected dot for i and j! Clever, and i will try to adopt it. Most of my handwritten writing these days is for myself.
> Only й and э require two strokes
Wouldn't the ф as well?
> [for the x], I draw two mirrored c’s
Isn't that what everyone is doing, or are we Frenchmen the exception?
For reference if the author reads this, we write the latin x exactly like the cyrillic х, i.e. reverse c, bottom-left to top-right diagonal, normal c.
I also use backtrack-free cursive too for my own personal notes, by not dotting i, j, and just not stopping to press pen when moving to dash t.
One problem I had was that dotless i tended to blend in with neighboring characters, e.g. "in" looked like "m", "ij" looked like "y". I solved that by elongating "i" downwards. This made it unintelligible for other people, so I only use it in my own personal notes.
> Single-stroke letter t often appears on logos.
Somehow, this caption appears to the right of two logos which clearly require two strokes for their ts. What happened?
I have had similar thoughts recently when attending language courses where I write a lot of notes by hand. This problem is exacerbated by umlauts. If the language doesn't have letters like ō (are there any? i only see this letter to represent a sound, never in a word), then the two dots can be replaced with a line and so, I guess, the lowercase T technique from the blog post could be adapted to it. I think I know what I am gonna do after work today
Really nice article (& website). This goes into my scrapbook.
Still use cursive after 60 years, though nowadays, less on paper, and more using Gboard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gboard). (It reads my handwriting better than I can, but I still keep looking for something better.)
As a guy who writes software for a living, I rarely put pen or pencil to paper. I type out everything, and print it if I need it. I have nice and simple note taking and list making sites for myself on the www, so that takes care of a lot of what people write for. I am odd, though, in the fact that I LOVE a good pen, and I have several nice ones that I never use.
Russian cursive is incredibly hard to read. Since handwriting even more than code is meant to be red, I think prioritising readability over ease of writing is actually acceptable.
I think the old German writing system “current” also has very few pen lifts, but reading that stuff gives me a headache.
> Instead of using two diagonal strokes, I draw two mirrored c’s, as my Russian penmanship teacher would suggest.
The "mirrored c's" is a perfectly normal way to write x longhand in English. At least that's how I was taught in England 65 years ago.
An italian influencer started speaking in italics/cursive. It's a silly thing, but the thought of pronouncing words differently because they are on bold or italics is interesting
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WLzDcJBfLOk
Great article! One perspective I'd like to share is that for me, the joy is mostly found in how beautiful the product is. From that standpoint, I don't particularly care how efficient I am at writing cursive. That said, this is a hand I would be interested to learn.
Try writing this sentence on your cell phone keyboard, if you use a "swipe" type keyboard interface. Fun! (All on the top row, so it is just sliding around on the top):
Rewrite proper prototype router report!
Anybody got a better one?
Usually writing small, in all-caps, except code: in lowercase, and the "t" and "i" retain their lower curve. Cursive is difficult; easy to write, but (later) hard to read.
Can see how penmanship there would be appreciated.
Some of this seems worth adopting. My personal hand already has some modifications to traditional school cursive and I've never liked certain letters maybe because of being left handed.
I never liked writing cursive. Then i tried a fancy pen once and it was so much better. I suspect cheap ballpoint pen killed cursive as much as anything else did.
In the Hotelplan logo, I think they are going straight from the o to the e, with a backtrack to make the downward line in the t. Which is kind of interesting as well.
I’ve often thought of this kind of concept for a programming language.
Maybe it’s the qwerty keyboard or my bad typing habits but certain characters break my flow when typing.
> ... in Russian. Only й (short i) and э (pronounced like e in end) require two strokes.
Plus some uppercase e.g. A, B, H, right?
All images on the site appear broken to me, using Chrome on Mac. Is it a site-issue or a me-issue?
Weird amount of negativity here.
Some person recognized a problem they wanted solved and put a bunch of effort into creating a unique solution.
I love this stuff.
This post is perfect for HN.
This is unrelated to the main thesis of the article, but worth pointing out as too many people equate the Cyrillic script with Russian language.
The Cyrillic script was invented in Bulgaria (during the First Bulgarian Empire), and was used to write Bulgarian language, creating a huge literary corpus, long before it began spreading to Kievan Rus. The Russian language itself comes from Old Bulgarian / Old Church Slavonic, as does Serbian and other "Slavic" languages.
And no, Bulgaria was never part of Russia nor the Soviet Union.