I've been collaborating with
Valdis Vītoliņš on hexadecimal digits. The result is a new set of digits:
They follow a design where the horizontal strokes represent 1, 2 and 4 in the binary composition of the number which each digit is supposed to represent. The rules for constructing the digits are:
- 0 is represented by a digit that looks like an 'o' or a '6'.
- 8 is represented by a digit that looks like a miniscule rho or a 'P'.
- Numbers 1-7 and 9-15 are represented by digits whose shape follows this plan:
We considered several possible sets of digits before settling on this one. We choose this new set of digits because
- We find it is the easiest to encode and decode.
- We find that pairs of these digits can be combined into readable ligatures.
Valdis has created fonts for the digits and ligatures, which I have incorporated into a branch of the Hex Editor plugin for Notepad++ . It has all the features of the mainline Hex Editor plugin, but also offers the option of viewing hexadecimal data with the new characters in place of the traditional 0-9A-F. If you'd like to use it, then download this zip file and run the setup executable contained therein:
The fonts look like this:
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1 comment:
Great work, Mack!
I suppose main improvements in such alternative view of binary data are:
1. Positional shapes of digits improve finding bit patterns in stream of bytes,
2. Ligatures allow to show value of one byte as one character. Eventually it could make whole sub-area of binary editors obsolete, as currently most of them are designed around issue that one byte in numeric value is shown with two characters.
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