Cistercian Glyphs

Cistercian numerals are a medieval notation that writes any number from 1 to 9999 as a single glyph on one vertical staff. Four quadrants around the staff, one for each decimal place, a few strokes in each. You read all four at once, not left to right.

This app draws them, and lets you take them with you.

THE GENERATOR Set the number on a four-column wheel, one column per place value. The glyph is written as you turn it — a stroke at a time, outward from the staff, in the order a scribe would write them.

Eight contrast-checked colour pairings, or any two colours you like.

Eight finishes, in two groups. Four are light described as gradients: flat, aura, spotlight, nebula. Four are surfaces generated on the GPU, and they are the things a gradient cannot be — ink let into water, gilding catching the light, vellum held up to a window, curtains of aurora. All eight are built from the two colours you already chose, and there is no third colour anywhere in them.

Beside the light, four materials: what the numeral is made of rather than how it is lit. Smooth, grain, letterpress, bleed. Light and matter are separate questions, so all thirty-two combinations are real.

None of it is a fixed picture. Every finish and every material sits on levers, so a preset is where you start rather than where you have to stay, and a generated surface holds still at a phase you choose. It holds still by default: this is a tool for making a still picture.

Export a PNG up to 4096 pixels, with transparency if you want it, or an SVG — real vector geometry, not a trace of a bitmap.

HAND-LETTERED The forty glyphs are not generated geometry. They were lettered by hand, and they keep the weight and the stroke modulation of the original drawing.

The small diamonds are part of that drawing. Historically a zero is simply an empty quadrant, which leaves a number like 1000 with three quarters of the field empty and the composition falling to one side. The dots mark the corners a quadrant's strokes never reach, so 78 reads as a considered 0078 rather than a fragment. They carry no numeric meaning, and you can switch them off for the plain historical form.

LEARN An essay on where the notation came from, what it was actually used for — indexes and concordances, page numbers, exactly one surviving astrolabe, wine barrels around Bruges — and why it died out. The diagrams are drawn separately, in plain geometry, so the historical system stays legible underneath the calligraphy.

PRIVACY The app contains no networking code. It never contacts a server, mine included. Nothing is collected and there is no account.

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