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BGonline.org Forums
Hierarchy scheme
Posted By: Nack Ballard In Response To: Can you see the underlined g? (Timothy Chow)
Date: Friday, 23 December 2011, at 4:23 a.m.
Casper's suggestion of using diacritical marks rather than weight, style, and color may be worth more than just casual consideration. Certainly for handwritten use, it's a lot easier to add a diacritical mark than to use different colors or even to make sure your handwritten bold/italic characters are obviously bold/italic.
Of course, this would be a fairly major change to the nactation system, but I suspect there are only about a half-dozen nactators in the world who have ever used underlines or italics, so it doesn't seem too late to switch.
Yes, definitely not too late, and I consider it a nearly invisible change in practical terms. Mike has been polite enough to let me say it at bgonline first, but the underline/bold twist is already under revision for non-underlined families and over the last couple of weeks Mike and I (with Matt and David chiming in as well) have been exploring the viability of diacritical marks (primarily overbars and circles).
The fact is that below-fourth members rarely arise in live play (especially in the early game), even as weaker candidate plays buried in a nacbrac that might have been played on an off day. Even when it does, there is almost always a less encumbered family available. In the case of 21$-65R-43C-21H-11, which dealt with the worst case double aces involving deep back checkers, E had f and (the barely assumptive) numeral 2 as alternatives.
That said, if a fifth-member situation does arise (by choice or necessity) today, I already deem the overbar (or high horizontal diacritical mark) to be a direct replacement alternative to bold font. Indeed, as I mentioned to Mike and the others, I was overbarring (overlining) instead of bold in written Nactation in early experiments many years ago, before I had developed all the letters (to distribute the load) and relieved digging necessity with the hit/most/6 rule.
In other words, the current hierarchy for a letter, whether it is an underlined or non-underlined family, is A, a, A, a, A, a, A, a, or the bold font in the latter four characters can be replaced with an overbar or overbarlike effect (high diacritical lines or even umlauts if sufficiently visible). Ultimately, if the perception is that overbars are both viewable and convenient enough to implement, then overbar will become the unique standard for 5th to 8th and bold font pushed to the next level (9th to 16th) -- and color to below 16th.
Because below-fourth-member situations arise with so little frequency, I generally feel comfortable using bold font for emphasis (a second usage). I would feel more comfortable if bold were even further removed (i.e., official only for below-eighth situations).
Nack
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