Kim-ized Masked Letters

Kim-ized Text Demo

In 1987, Scott Kim made a puzzle for Publish! magazine in which readers had to guess proverbs by seeing just the green rectangle that barely contained each letter (you can see examples in Douglas Hofstadter's 2025 book "Ambigrammia"). The puzzle shows that there's a lot of information contained just in the height & width of letters and their overall "skyline" within words. You can explore this phenomenon in this app by changing the text and settings:

• Text: You can generate a random proverb or type in your own text. You can also hide or reveal the text to test your ability to see the proverb.
• Font: You can change the font family and size of the letters.
• Reveal %: controls what percentage of the letters in the proverb are revealed. Revealed letters get a small black dot beneath them because it might be hard to tell which letters are actually present if they are dim.
• Ink level: controls how dark the revealed letters are.
• Noise: overlays black/white noise over the final image.

Things to notice and try

• How do you succeed in reading a proverb? Does the whole proverb just come to you, or do you piece it together from individual letters and words?
• When you know what the proverb is and some letters are completely missing, do you still see them on the green rectangles? People differ in how much they "hallucinate" the black ink that makes up the missing letters. I do hallucinate black letters (or pieces of letters), but they come and go fleetingly. Why might these hallucinations helping people to read?
• What combinations of font size, black ink level, and noise help you the most in reading the proverbs? Are they the same as the combinations that lead to the most hallucinations of letter pieces?