New Samuel is a font by Aurelian Hallhuber that he derived from Morse code (Samuel is one of Morse’s given names).

Creating New Samuel

In Morse code, each of the 26 letters of the basic Latin alphabet is encoded via at most 4 signals (dot or dash). Write those dots and dashes into a 2×2 matrix, starting at the bottom left cell, continuing counter-clockwise. Create a square whose corners encode what’s in the matrix: If a cell is empty then the corner is a single line (e.g. / for the top left corner). If a cell contains a dot then the corner is round. If a cell contains a dash then the corner is angular. Add features to these squares to make them recognizable as characters. As a result, you get a font whose characters reflect their Morse code combinations.

The following steps were used to create the font:The following diagram illustrates the process:

This is the full alphabet:

Morse code signals: more than bits

more combinations than 4 bits (16), because each combination has varying a length. If you don’t ignore leading zeros, all 4 bit numbers have length 4.

less combinations than 4 ternary digits (81), because empty digits cannot appear everywhere, they must be a suffix.

..-- .-.- ---. ----

4-signal morse codes give youYou get 30 combinations: 2 (length 1) + 4 (length 2) + 8 (length 3) + 16 (length 4). Thus, 4 combinations in international Morse code are unused. I’ve written a small JavaScript program that finds those combinations. They are: