Graphical Context of Printed Characters

Abstract

The notion of a grammar together with the concept of contextual modification of meaning have proved to be powerful means for studying verbal communication. It is natural to seek to apply these methods to other modes of communication. Not surprisingly, attempts along this line have already been made. For example, Eden and Halle (1959, 1961) first presented a grammar for cursive English writing in 1959. He decomposed words into strokes and further decomposed strokes into segments. Rankin and co-workers (1965, 1966, 1970) presented a generative grammar for Chinese ideograms. This grammar, when used in conjunction with a lexicon of basic shapes, was capable of generating 80% of the ideograms in Mattheus’ (1960) dictionary. More recently, Rosenfeld (1975) has explored Web grammars as a means for representing general two-dimensional images.