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Comment by Ygg2 | Hacker News Reader

I did some research on textual vs graphical representation for my master. According to that research (not on my comp so I can't reference it) - one of main advantages of text is a near universal set of symbols (like Ascii for images), more constrained relationships (images are 2D while text is essentially 1D).

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Most of text is 2D. What is usually regarded as text is just a collection of simplified and arranged 2D symbols. What is usually regarded as a picture is collection of unarranged non-simplified 2D symbols. 1D text would be more like morse code.

I didn't meant as a visual reprentation. Text no matter how well formatted/displayed will only flow in one direction* (be it up-down/down-up and left-to-right/right-to-left). In a picture you have no such constraints. Thus a picture is harder to scan by humans and machines alike. It takes expert knowledge to tune out some of distractions of visual representation.

* Exception being texts that are deformed to instill a sense of confusion and to simply play with how text looks like. Or possibly some really obscure non-European writing system that writes non-linearly.

Interesting. Do you have a paper you can link to?

Sorry, for the delay, here are some papers I read for that:

    * http://rtsys.informatik.uni-kiel.de/teaching/ws03-04/s-synth/papers/p33-petre.pdf 

    * http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~afb21/publications/VL96.html

The research I cited about lack of standard vocabulary of Symbols (like ASCII for text) comes from work that is not in English, and I can't find a version online. It makes intuitive and logical sense. A true visual language would parse images and have a standard sense of what symbols it may encounter.

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