Show HN: Conway's Game of Life, but as a div full of Braille characters(px.neocities.org) I built this many years ago to try out rendering images in textboxes, using braille characters as groups of 8 pixels. You can try different fonts to see how the spacing changes too. |
When I was in art school for graphic design, we were assigned a typography project to create a series of art pieces that used only "found typography", i.e. not fonts on your computer but, rather, type lifted from photographs of lettering in the wild.
As part of my designs, I incorporated Braille found in an elevator. The typography professor rejected this, leading to a 30 minute class discussion around whether or not Braille was a form of typography. In his opinion, it wasn't, and he failed me on the assignment. I still think I was right, and it's one of my favorite design pieces of my own to this day.
A bit like how you could make the debatable argument that code golf languages³ make the exercise boring and pointless.
Failing you might’ve been a bit much, though. Maybe you should’ve gotten a few points for originality and then from next year on the professor could explicitly forbid braille.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wingdings
² https://www.tunera.xyz/fonts/teranoptia/
³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_golf#Dedicated_golfing_la...
* https://github.com/mum4k/termdash?tab=readme-ov-file#the-lin...
* https://docs.rs/ratatui/latest/ratatui/widgets/struct.Chart....
* https://github.com/NimbleMarkets/ntcharts/blob/main/examples...
On a practical level, is it simply any terminal visualization that can destroy a terminal app experience, or only Braille rune rendering? We could include some guidelines in our project for how to include such charts while ensuring accessibility.
Besides via some configuration, I'm not sure how to programmatically recognize that terminal charts would be poorly experienced by a user.
EDIT: made a ticket for this https://github.com/NimbleMarkets/ntcharts/issues/2
Is the seed random? No matter how often I refresh it reaches a “dead” state after a few epochs only.
Maybe the recently posted "audio from billiards/2d particles" could be adapted with a ruleset to bring Conways GoL to a less visual-centric medium.
Unified English Braille (the specification that maps dot combinations to English characters) is not a typeface, just like ASCII is not a typeface.
I Ould argue, however, that a specification like Marburg Medium[1], which specifies how Braille should be represented physically, how big the dots should be, how far apart they should be spaced etc, is a typeface.
[1] https://www.pharmabraille.com/pharmaceutical-braille/marburg...
https://www.pharmabraille.com/pharmaceutical-braille/marburg...
The dots could be squares. The size of the dots (boldness) can vary.