ti-84 plus fanfiction rambling #438

i have been thinking about putting english fanfictions on a ti-84 plus.

i have only been thinking, and have been doing no doing. i think i know how to know how to do, but i do not yet know how to do.

let's suppose that a chapter of a fanfiction is 30 to 60 kilobytes. the ti-84 has 480 kilobytes available in ROM. this means that, theoretically, you could fit 8 to 16 chapters on a ti-84, if you don't even consider text compression. the reader code would also exist in ROM, which would unfortunately take up a lot of space. fortunately, you might be able to use RAM for some of the text.

i normally like to have around 250-300 words per page.

let us assume that each word represents 5 characters. the ti-84 plus has a screen size of 96x64 pixels. this does not bode well. the ultlang font (https://github.com/ultlang/ultlf) and the minecraft font are both 7 pixels tall. if you have another pixel for in-between line spacing, you can only have 8 lines at a time. letters are generally around 4 pixels in width (and one extra pixel for intraletter spacing), so you're looking at 25 pixels per word. you can only have 4 words per line, which is 32 words per page. this not good.

alternatively, braille is an option. you get 32 letters per line, and 16 lines, which works out to 80 words per page. still less than 1/3 of minimum target.

you might be able to make words compact by replacing weird english things like 'ough' with shorter forms. braille already does this with some phrases. however, this might be difficult to decipher if done automatically - consider 'though', 'through', 'thought', 'cough', 'bough'. consider also 'th' in 'the' and 'rivethead'. consider also homographs.

:c

i may in the future consider pixel-oriented logographies such as peeekriv, although i am worried about space for sprite storage.

a solution might be to do a ti-84-not-plus for the screen resolution, but that would involve having a ti-84-not-plus

english has about 8 letters per bit of actual information, just compress it optimally using Algorithms?

i'm not thinking that text compression will be an issue

my primary concern is visual representation of the text, since the 96x64 pixels is so small. i normally like to have over 300-400 words per page (i was wrong earlier about 250-300), but i'm just not sure that's feasible outside of a very dense logography

even with peeekriv, 300 words doesn't seem attainable. 200 words doesn't seem attainable, either. i cannot rule out 100 words.

crushing the words down so that they fit into the display sounds unpleasant. you could just deal with the large text size and scroll quickly.

If you have a TI-84 Plus CE Color, then you could make the letterforms narrower using subpixel rendering...