Don’t Believe The Type

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Typoglycemia is the lighthearted name given to a purported recent discovery about the cognitive processes behind reading written text. The name makes little sense as glycemia is the concentration of glucose in the blood. It is an urban legend/Internet meme that does have some element of truth behind it.

The legend is propagated by email and message boards and demonstrates that readers can understand the meaning of words in a sentence even when the letters of each word are scrambled. As long as all the necessary letters are present, and the first and last letters remain the same, readers turn out to have little trouble reading the text.

In actual fact, no such research was carried out at Cambridge University. It all started with a letter to the New Scientist magazine from Graham Rawlinson in which he discusses his Ph.D. thesis. Wtrie yuor Tmylyieogpcc msegesas hree.

Vikesh Bhatt
Posted on Friday, 7th of April 2006 Permalink Comment (1)

Typography Viral

1 Comment

#!/usr/bin/env python
# # fast hack to illustrate typoglycemia in a random text. Licensed
# under the GPL v2. or later. Does not preserve formatting. Drops non
# alpha characters. Does nothing with words under four chars.

import sys, re, random as rr

try:
  text = open(sys.argv[1]).read()
except:
  print “Takes a path to a file as the only argument”
  sys.exit()

tlist = text.split()

accum = []
ss = re.compile(r”^[a-zA-Z]+$”)

for i in tlist:
  z = []
  rval = []
  if not ss.search(i):
      pass
  else:
      for e in i:
        z.append(e)
      rval.append( z[0] )
      h = z[1:-1]

      rr.shuffle(h)

      rval.append(’‘.join(h))
      rval.append( z[-1:][0] )

  accum.append(’‘.join(rval))

print ’ ’.join(accum)

Posted by Buster McFadden on Wednesday, May 2007 at 7:08 PM

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