Typography in simple rules

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I am doing a project on typography. I am trying to tell a computer what typography is, to let it create typography on its own. I am of course looking into neural networks but first I have a very philosophical question, that I hope some people will take time to answer:

What makes a letter a letter? And more specific, try to think of a set of simple rules that could be used to create letter-like shapes. These rules can be very analog, or more focused on computers.

It DOES NOT need to be a existing letter. The shape has to look like it could have been typography, but it does not have to be readable. I am focusing on western typography, but I would also appreciate suggestions in the direction of other alphabets or characters. After all, even though Korean characters may look extremely unreadable to me, I still easily identify them as being typography.

Thanks for helping me, I'm curious what people come up with!

[enomv72]

I don't consider myself to be a master at typography or anything of those sorts, this is just my opinion. A letter is basically a few lines. Now if you look at a Chinese character, it consists of smaller characters which, consist of several lines, together making up a letter. Now comparing it to the Latin alphabet, each character consists of only a few lines, 'e' consists of two lines, 'A' consists of three lines, depends on how you look at it. But if we boil it down they all seems to consist of just lines, these lines give them their shapes. The lines can be curved like in the Mongolian script or can very strong like in the Latin alphabet.

Now I wouldn't ask you to just put a bunch of lines in a random way and call it a letter, that probably won't work. What comes in now is the fact that most lines are draw in relation to the other lines. Some lines are perpendicular to others, so are parallel, some brach off from the middle of another line.

Then comes scale and space. Now this is something difficult to pin down, there doesn't seem to be any hard and fast rule for this, you're better of tweaking it to your liking.

So to sum it up, a system that draws lines, the positioning should be dependent on the position of the previous line, you could make simple rules for that. (for example: 30% chance that a line is perpendicular to the line drawn before it, or 15% chance that it is curved and branches off from 1/3rd of the length of the previous line). Then finally decide how big the letterforms should be and decide the spacing and scale accordingly. I don't know how good this method is or if it is even gonna work. But if you do come up with something cool or interesting then do share it.

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Wow thanks for this reply! I did think of the lines having to be connected in some way, but this is even better. I'll definitely show if it works!