Article URL: https://mmapped.blog/posts/52-backtrack-free-cursive Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48888518 Points: 54 # Comments: 19

I love writing in cursive, shaping each word in one long stroke. If you grew up learning the Latin alphabet, you likely don’t realize how much joy it sucks out of cursive writing. I noticed only because I learned the Cyrillic alphabet first. I think and write primarily in English, yet Russian feels more enjoyable to write. I narrowed the problem to backtracking—the need to add strokes to the letters I’ve partially written. English wants me to dot my i’s and cross my t’s. It has a lot of them, and they like to cluster in a single word. Instead of thinking about what I want to write next, I have to maintain a mental queue of pending strokes. Backtracking is rare in Russian. Only й (short i) and э (pronounced like e in end) require two strokes. There is also ё (pronounced yo, like in New York), but its umlaut is optional. So much of Russian literature is written without ё that native speakers infer it unconsciously. To quantify my discomfort, I analyzed Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment in Russian and English and computed how much backtracking I would have to do if I were to write it in cursive. The English version needs backtracking for 51% of words with 0.68 backtracks per word on average. In Russian, only 6.4% of words need backtracks, with 0.066 backtracks per word on average. One way to remove backtracking is to lift the pen immediately instead of waiting until the end of the word, as if doing italic calligraphy. Pen lifts alleviate the mental queue problem and give a chance to readjust the palm, but they break the writing flow. Dots and crosses are even more irritating on digital notebooks because the undo feature works on the stroke level. Often, I want to remove the last word I’ve written. If each word required only one stroke to write, I could do it in a single tap. But since every other word requires multiple strokes, I resort to the eraser tool, which is slower and more distracting. I couldn’t find a cursive script that would address my annoyances, so I designed one. It’s based on SmithHand, with occasional borrowings from the Russian script I learned at school. SmithHand renders most lowercase letters in one stroke, except x, t, i, and j. x is the easiest letter to fix. Instead of using two diagonal strokes, I draw two mirrored c’s, as my Russian penmanship teacher would suggest.