Chapter grammar — every paper follows the same skeleton
- The Absence
- The Innovation
- The Spread
- The Standard
- The Legacy
Each convention is examined from the world before it existed, through its invention and spread, to the standard that froze it and the habits it left us with.
01 · · The Space BetweenWord spacing — Greek and Latin ran words together (scriptio continua); medieval Irish scribes pried them apart, and reading changed. Forthcoming
02 ¶ Points and PausesPunctuation — from the dot systems of antiquity to the comma, the question mark, and the standardising press. Forthcoming
03 Aa Two CasesMajuscule and minuscule — how the Roman capitals grew a lowercase (Carolingian minuscule) and why we still keep both. Forthcoming
04 é Marks AboveDiacritics — accents, tildes, points: bolting extra sounds onto borrowed alphabets. Forthcoming
05 ـ The Cursive ImperativeArabic joining — why most letters take four shapes and there is no ‘printed’ form with letters apart. Forthcoming
06 ⌨ Keys and LayersInput — one key per sign, layered, or composed: how scripts meet a keyboard, from ЙЦУКЕН to Cherokee to the IME. Floor 4 → 07 ▢ The Box Called TofuMissing glyphs — the □ of font fallback, encoded-but-not-renderable, and why Noto exists. Floor 4 → 08 ⇄ Which Way to ReadDirectionality — left, right, top-down, and boustrophedon; bidi and the mixed-direction line. Floor 4 → Toward the book
This series is declared complete at eight papers. On completion it moves to Naisu Press as a volume in the institute's imprint — same chapter grammar, same specimens, print-first typesetting via the Paged.js pipeline. Chapters published here remain open access; the book is the collected, revised edition.