The game’s dialogue and story are all written in a series of ever more complex writing systems, unseen and novel to the game. There’s a mechanic where you get to prove to the game you understand what is being written or said (characters have subtitles also in the writing systems) and it’s really good fun!

Pittman shorthand: https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6Wr53ouD4Ok/WhxIZR6AOZI/AAAAAAABI...

Sennaarian writing: https://cdn.focus-home.com/fhi-fastforward-admin/resources/g...

Both of these make the writing faster, but reading slower. I once spoke the world's champion shorthand writer - I've forgotten her name. She said the even she cannot read shorthand as fast as regular text.

Which made sense before computers, when a stenographer needs to write very quickly, and English is written long.

Bt, nowadays we need the opposite - a "shorthand" which, once you have learned, can be consumed quickly. I know from experience that it takes much less time to read Hebrew than to read the same text in English (even though my mother tongue is English), since the vowels are assumed and abbreviations are extremely common - the actual text is shorter and quicker to read.

I can scan a long article quickly, but I wish there was a way to convert that to a writing system that was quicker to intake.

Shavian alphabet https://www.shavian.info/alphabet/

Which has similar goals

Does anyone have any experience with this that suggests that maybe it can be clearer than cursive?

One can always hope…

But she never seemed to actually use it later in her life (she still touch typed tho!).

I wonder how useful shorthand is in these days when cheap recording devices are available in everyone's pocket.

Maybe people who keep hand written diaries still use it?

Classic shorthand has never worked for me as it records the sound rather than the semantics. This is reasonable as a way to time delay dictation (when you read the shorthand you hear the sound in your head, so you type as if you were hearing the person speaking in realtime). But when I read I don't hear any sounds, so this would be like listening to the person speak, which defeats all the advantages of reading.

Orthic has some of that, but not to the extent of Gregg.

There are multiple levels of shorthand, the faster ones drop more and more information from each word if it can be inferred from the context (for someone familiar with the topic, i.e. yourself mainly).

Shorthand never really stuck for me. Learning to write and read it wasn't that difficult actually, but I couldn't quickly scan shorthand notes like I could with regular writing. I suppose that's a matter of practice and I wasn't ready to sink hundreds of hours into just that. One thing I learned from the experience was how frustrating of an experience it is if you're not good at reading. I have always been an above average reader and I couldn't understand how people struggled so much with it. Reading shorthand was effortful and slow, especially at the very beginning for me and that gave me some perspective of how some of my classmates must have felt.

I have most success with nibs which are very smooth but stubby. TWSBI Diamond 580 with 1.1 mm stub nib worked best for me, but it takes bottled ink.

The emphasis on curve and proportion in Gregg has made my cursive hand much more regular, flowing and pleasing to the eye. I’m sure similar benefits would accrue to learning and practising Orthic where specific curves, angles and joins have meaning.