On Tue, 21 Dec 2004 13:38:46 +0100, Philip Newton
<philip.newton@...> wrote:

> And indeed, it was formerly common to write a dash or breve over
> handwritten lower-case u's in Germany to distinguish them from n's. (I>
> still see it occasionally, but I think the practice is more widespread
> among older people.)

Thank you!

Some time ago, a middle-aged friend born in Germany, who had learned a
trad'l. handwritten script as a schoolchild, really searched her memory
and was able to write the letters as she remembered being taught. They
were amazing for their forms; some, like the Cyrillic m-like t, were not
recognizable for what they were.

I think we have a fertile topic, that of handwritten forms of various
writing systems.

Perhaps image analysis has reached the point where we can consider useful
OCR of careful handwritten script. Feature extraction of such text would,
I strongly suspect, be much more sophisticated than OCR of typeset text.

I can remember being taught an excessively-fussy script in school; one of
its most-easily-described features was a cap. Q that looked very much like
a large numeral 2. The small r had a spike on top, a ramp on its right,
and a sharp corner at the end of the ramp.

Judging only by local hand lettering, we seem to have improved
significantly from the sub-literate scrambled-case mess that I've probably
ranted about in the past.

Regards,

--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass.
The curious hermit -- autodidact and polymath