I am a fan of using Cistercian for date stamps, with a glyph for the year, month+day, hour+minute. Like this: <<a href="https://me.micahrl.com/blog/cistercian-dates/" rel="nofollow">https://me.micahrl.com/blog/cistercian-dates/</a>><p>I also made a little decimal to Cistercian translator once. The numerals aren't in Unicode, so the font I use has to make use of private code points, which was kind of fun to get working properly. <<a href="https://cistercian.micahrl.com" rel="nofollow">https://cistercian.micahrl.com</a>>
If you like that, check out my favorite Cistercian numeral library: <a href="https://github.com/hsablonniere/cistercian-numerals">https://github.com/hsablonniere/cistercian-numerals</a><p>Here's a demo of it in action on the author's blog: <a href="https://www.hsablonniere.com/a-clock-based-on-cistercian-numerals--hptit8/" rel="nofollow">https://www.hsablonniere.com/a-clock-based-on-cistercian-num...</a><p>I ended up using that library to create a simple Cistercian clock screensaver. My hope was that I'd learn to read Cistercian numbers fluently though I'm still working on that.
Reminds me a lot of the D'ni numbers from <i>Riven</i>.<p>D'ni numerals overlay two base-5 values in the same space, one horizontal & the other vertical, to represent 0–24. There's even a one-character numeral for 25, though it rarely comes up in-game. Different, of course, but I wouldn't be surprised if Cistercian was the inspiration.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/dni.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/dni.htm</a><p>[2] <a href="https://dni.fandom.com/wiki/D'ni_Numerals" rel="nofollow">https://dni.fandom.com/wiki/D'ni_Numerals</a>
I like these.<p>I feel like there's a missed symmetry here though and almost symmetrical things are like a wobbly tooth in my brain.<p>The right line appears at 6, but if you added that at <i>5</i> you could repeat the pattern you did for 1-4 for the horizontal lines, which it almost does. 7 and 8 are 6+1 and 6+2.<p><a href="https://imgur.com/a/NE36rIW" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/NE36rIW</a>
There is also a Numberphile video going into their history [0]. About monks with a vow of silence.<p>[0]: <a href="https://youtu.be/9p55Qgt7Ciw" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/9p55Qgt7Ciw</a>
There’s something very satisfying about the idea that the numerals themselves can be generated algorithmically.<p>For example, here’s a nifty Cistercian numeral generator: <a href="https://shelby.cool/#/sketch/cistercian-numerals" rel="nofollow">https://shelby.cool/#/sketch/cistercian-numerals</a>
One SVG to display 1 to 9,999 by using just a bit of JavaScript to toggle CSS classes to show/hide segments and update the SVG's accessible name.<p><a href="https://adrianroselli.com/2021/02/cistercian-svg.html" rel="nofollow">https://adrianroselli.com/2021/02/cistercian-svg.html</a>
The problems are that this is 1) hard to use for arithmetic, and 2) brittle.<p>"Brittle" because you're peacefully sitting there at 9999 coins or whatever, and you earn another one, and suddenly you can't represent it. Arabic (Hindu) numerals just slap another digit to the left, but Cistercian numerals break.<p>(You could fix that by using an Arabic notation - two Cistercian numbers, with the left one meaning "multiply this by 10,000". At that point, Cistercian numbers become a compressed Arabic notation. Still harder to use for arithmetic, but that's true of many compressed formats.)
This looks a lot like how Chinese characters are composed of individual "radicals", arranged like tetris blocks inside the same square box. Some of them affect the meaning of the letter, while others only signify the sound it's supposed to make. The resulting writing system is not easy for foreigners to learn, but it makes quite an efficient use of space. This might have been more valuable at a time when writable surfaces were expensive.
For your embedded cistercian projects: <a href="https://www.tindie.com/products/savageelectronics/rgb-cistercian-display/" rel="nofollow">https://www.tindie.com/products/savageelectronics/rgb-cister...</a><p>(I'm not the maker, I just noticed these last year on Tindie and picked up a couple.)
Not my work, but I found this 3d printed digital clock using cistercian numeral system online. It looks like a cool project: <a href="https://www.instructables.com/Cistercian-Digital-Clock/" rel="nofollow">https://www.instructables.com/Cistercian-Digital-Clock/</a>
here is some research that was done on adding cistercian to unicode <a href="https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20290-cistercian-digits.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20290-cistercian-digits.pdf</a><p>you can still email the author. he would love for someone to continue the research
Oh how I wish the glyphs started at the top right and moved anti clockwise one quadrant for each power of two, to be consistent with right handed coordinate systems