I'm designing a secret writing system for tabletop games where each word becomes one glyph. The system uses a grid of letters: starting at the center of the first letter, I draw lines to the centers of the following letters, similar to a smartphone swipe keyboard. I may need special markers for the beginning and end of a word, consecutive identical letters, letters that fall in a straight line with the previous and next letters, and crossing lines. I'm also considering an outer circle around the grid to make the encoding unambiguous.
I have limited programming experience, mostly with Python and R. My rough plan is to assign coordinates to each letter, split the input into words and characters, convert each character to a coordinate, draw the connecting paths and special markers, then export each word as a transparent PNG. I'd appreciate guidance on implementing the drawing and exporting portions, or suggestions for a better format or programming approach.
4 Answers
The drawing portion can be separated from the encoding logic. First convert a word into a list such as [(x1,y1),(x2,y2),...]. Then pass that list to a renderer that draws the grid, outer circle, line segments, and special symbols. Keeping those steps separate will make it much easier to change the visual style or export to SVG, PNG, or another format later.
Your overall plan makes sense. Treat each word as a path: look up the coordinate for each character, move to the first point, then draw line segments to the remaining points. A graphics library such as Python’s matplotlib can draw the paths, circles, and other markers, and it can save the result with a transparent background.
You may also want to consider SVG instead of PNG. SVG stores the path as coordinates and supports transparency naturally, so it stays sharp at any size. Once the path-generation code works, you can render the SVG to PNG if you need image files. Canvas-style path drawing is another useful concept to study.
Make sure the encoding is unambiguous if you ever want to decode it reliably. Different letter sequences can produce the same visible path when lines overlap, retrace one another, or pass through an intermediate point. Start and end markers, repeated-letter markers, and an outer boundary may help, but test the design with many words and look for collisions. If occasional ambiguity is intentional for the game, that can also be a valid design choice.
An outer circle could help identify the grid boundary, but it may not by itself distinguish every sequence. You’ll want to check cases involving repeated letters, straight-line triples, and reversed paths.
A custom font is another possible route, especially if you want to type the encoded words into documents as part of normal text. You could generate or draw the glyphs as vector artwork, assign them to characters in a font editor, and let the font renderer handle positioning. However, you would need a defined set of words or symbols, since ordinary fonts map individual character codes rather than dynamically interpreting arbitrary words. For a system that can encode any input, generating paths directly is likely simpler.
Would using a custom font be mainly useful if I wanted to place the generated glyphs directly inside ordinary text?