The above picture shows what happens when you remove the bottom 50% of each line. The obvious thing to do would be to write a Python script that takes some text, and crops its lines by a given percentage. Perhaps we can use a computer algorithm to create a signature for the top of each letter and try to infer words based on English statistics and Markov chains perhaps if we sit for 5 minutes per word we can sort it out but that’s beyond the point. By unreadable, I actually mean, hard to read fluently.

How much of each line can we crop while still maintaining readability? Of course, if we reduce each line to just a few scattered dots, we won’t be able to infer anything about the words it’s natural to assume that there exists a steep threshold at which the text becomes unreadable.

Just try reading something in a foreign language with Latin script, or handling a book with plenty of new vocabulary. Familiar words are instantly recognized, and idioms, common phrases, and logical extensions from context all make reading much faster than if we had read words letter by letter. Indeed, it has been known for quite a while that people hardly read individual letters. The coolest thing about the following text is that you can read it.

Top half of words cut off in word