Gernreich writing
← All projects
Read the writeup, write and read the script
A script in which every letter is two steps on a square grid, and every word is
one unbroken line. A pen on the grid can step in eight directions; two steps
that don't double back make exactly 28 shapes, and the alphabet uses all of
them, assigned so that the distance between a letter's two ends follows how
common it is in English: T and E, the most common, reach furthest, which keeps
a sentence moving across the page and makes it easier to write. The letters
are A–Z, KH, and a 28th drawn in the chart as a marked R (Ř). Each shape can
be traced either way, so the writer picks a direction for each letter to keep
the line going; a reader needs only the starting dot.
Whose work this is. The Gernreich writing, its alphabet and the texts written in
it are Michael Carnright's, apart from the two coordinate lines, which someone else
drew and sent him to translate. gernreich.js (writer and reader) and every drawing in
images/ (the chart, Article 1, the map loop and the coordinates,
all redrawn with the chart's letters) are by Claude Code.
| Path | What |
|---|
index.html | the writeup, with a live writer and reader |
gernreich.js | the alphabet table, write (text to path), read (path to text), and snake and snakeSVG, which draw Article 1 as one line (the page redraws it a different way on each click) |
make_chart.js | draws images/alphabet.svg from the table |
make_article.js | draws images/article-1-claude.svg: Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as one line |
test.js | node test.js: the table, Michael's samples read back, round trips, and all three SVGs reproduce |
make_coords.js | draws images/coordinates.svg: the two graph-paper lines (a GPS position) with the chart's letters |
images/ | the drawings above, and the map loop redrawn over its map |
Released under CC0 1.0.
Credits
The script is Michael Gernreich's; Claude (Anthropic), working in Claude Code, co-wrote the code and the documentation that present it. Commits Claude made carry a Co-Authored-By: Claude line.
