glyph¶

glyph is the dictionary and toolkit for the grid script: the way humans write down what Ross 128 b sends, in InterImm's The Contact Era.

It draws words and pages on the grid, keeps the vocabulary honest, reads a page as a knowledge graph, and reads a drawing back into text.

A three-voice page: their statement in cyan, our reply in yellow, a third party in violet

"Your world is an air-world." We answer water under air. A third party answers air under our water, siding with them.

Try it in one line¶

No install needed if you have uv:

uvx --from glyph-cli glyph show BODY.OTHER STAR.TIME COUNT.137

+++.+++   .+..+.+   .....+.
+++.+..   +++.+.+   ......+
+++.+++   .+..+.+   +++...+
  BODY.OTHER: your world
  STAR.TIME: pulsar
  COUNT.137: 137

uvx fetches glyph-cli from PyPI and runs it. To keep the glyph command, install it with uv tool install glyph-cli (or pipx install glyph-cli, or pip install glyph-cli), then follow Getting started.

What it does¶

Command	What for
`glyph parts`	The 16 parts and what they mean as a thing and as a relation
`glyph list`, `find`, `check`	Look words up
`glyph show`	Draw words
`glyph number`	Write a number in base-512 digits
`glyph render`	Draw a whole page, as text or as SVG pixels
`glyph graph`	Read a page as a knowledge graph (text, JSON or Graphviz)
`glyph decode`	Read a drawing back into page source
`glyph init`, `add`, `remove`, `validate`	Grow the vocabulary without breaking it
`glyph export-md`	Publish the vocabulary as Markdown

Every command is in the command reference. The rules it follows are in The script.

In the story¶

The grid script is our way of representing their language, not their language itself. As far as anyone can tell, they speak by resonance, in air: one voice alone makes only a few tones, and voices together make richer ones. The grid is how the translating machine writes that speech down, one band per voice. Nobody has seen them use any script, and nobody knows what they look like. glyph is that machine's lexicon, made real: a growing list of signs, each with a meaning, that every new transmission is read against.