About Glyph Grammar

An invented script you can grow, read and share. Every alphabet here is new: its letters are grown from rules, so no one has seen it before, and any message you type is written out in it as a piece of art.

What's going on

Each alphabet starts from a seed, or from a passphrase. From that, a set of rules draws every letter, digit and punctuation mark: carving notches into blocks, laying strokes on a small grid, or arranging little pictures, depending on the script style. A checker drafts each letter many times and keeps the draft least like the others, so the letters stay easy to tell apart.

Your message is then set like type: words flow along lines, long words are hyphenated at sensible English break points, and glyphs stretch across half-lines and brick together until the whole page is filled. Grey "hidden" glyphs fill the gaps: they're written but not spoken, and the reader skips them.

How to use it

1. Write. Type a message under Your message, or press Another quote. Press Play or Read it to follow along, and hover any glyph to see its word.
2. Style it. Under Look, choose a script and colors. New alphabet gives a whole new set of letters (and a new reading key). Rearrange glyphs keeps the same letters and key and lays the page out afresh, which is handy if a page looks crowded or doesn't read back cleanly.
3. Go further (optional). Switch the controls to Advanced for page layout, reading direction, alphabet details and the Protection modes. For real secrecy use Password encryption, ideally with a Passphrase alphabet.
4. Share it. Download a PNG or SVG, share a link, or post it to Facebook. Give your reader the reading key, and any password or passphrase, separately.
5. Read it. Paste a key into the decoder, then decode an exported image, the page on screen, or a photo of a print.

The theory

A grammar of tone. Brightness carries meaning. Word starts are brightest, vowels and later letters fade, punctuation is muted, and spaces and hidden glyphs sit in the faintest grey, much as some scripts mark roots and suffixes.

A cipher, not just a picture. Each letter maps to one glyph shape. That makes a plain page a substitution cipher: a fun puzzle, but breakable by anyone patient. The protection modes raise the bar step by step:

• Hide the structure. Scrambles the tones, disguises the spaces and scatters null glyphs that mean nothing.
• Homophones. Gives common letters several glyphs, so letter counts give little away.
• Password encryption. Locks the message with AES-256 before it's drawn, so the glyphs show only scrambled data.
• Rotor cipher. Secrecy from glyphs alone, after the Enigma machine: each letter of a word is enciphered by its own scrambled alphabet from a 128-bit key, and word gaps are drawn as letter-like glyphs, so nothing can be counted or guessed. Only the reading key opens it.
• Passphrase alphabet. Grows the letters themselves from your passphrase, so there's no short seed to guess.

Reading it back. The decoder finds the page grid, cuts out each glyph, rejoins pieces that belong together and matches every shape against the alphabet it rebuilds from the key. Encrypted pages carry error-correcting glyphs, the same family of codes QR codes use, so a few misread shapes can still be repaired. A photo of a print is straightened from its four corners first, and the lighting is evened out.

Your secrets stay with you. Everything, including encoding, decoding, encryption and the test before sharing, runs in your own browser. Passwords and passphrases never leave your device.

Privacy. When this site runs on its own server, it keeps simple daily counts: page visits, shares and where visitors arrived from (a site name like facebook.com). There are no cookies, no IP addresses are stored, and your messages are never seen.

Script styles

Carved blocks, Hellenic strokes (Greek-inspired), Roman capitals (Latin-inspired, with optional lowercase), Calligraphic (Arabic-inspired), Pictographic (Egyptian-inspired), Rock art (petroglyph-inspired) and Scribe (handwriting-inspired). Each is inspired by a writing tradition without copying its real characters. The stroke-drawn scripts can also be given a handwriting slant. For password-protected messages, Carved blocks, Hellenic strokes and Roman capitals read back most reliably.

Credits

Inspiration. This project began from the generative glyph studies of ToroRojo-AlgoArt, shared as My Generative Manifesto 1 to 3 on r/generative: pages made in R from a rule-built glyph inventory, layered by tone and a "grammar of color," with roots, suffixes and letters "written but not spoken," readable right to left with lines that split and merge. Glyph Grammar grew from those ideas into a working script you can write and read. See more of their work on Instagram at @tororojo_algoart.

Scribe. The handwriting style follows Aric Maddux's Asemic Writing with Poisson Disc Sampling (The Last Index): well-spaced points ordered around their centre and joined in one smooth stroke. That builds on Anders Hoff's spline script (inconvergent). Here each letter is kept separate so messages can still be read back.

Quotes. The default messages are real, sourced quotations about the natural world, adventure and our shared humanity.

Created by Jason Buchheim of Odyssey Expeditions: marine biologist, ocean photographer and immersive-media developer, building odd machines for curious minds.