Picture Alphabets

What it's for

Write a message in an alphabet of symbols, or read one, for puzzles, geocaches, escape rooms and classroom activities. The alphabets are:

• Pigpen (the masonic cipher): each letter is the shape of its cell in a grid or an X, some with a dot.
• Flag semaphore: the positions of two hand-held flags, as the reader sees the signaller.
• Maritime signal flags: the International Code of Signals’ flag for each letter.
• Hexahue: Josh Cramer’s colour alphabet, each character a block of six coloured squares. Letters use red, green, blue, yellow, cyan and magenta once each; digits use white, grey and black; and it has . and , too.
• Braille, Elder Futhark runes and Greek letters: characters you can copy as text.

For example, when a geocache’s clue is a row of pigpen symbols, choose Pigpen and click each symbol you see under Read symbols to spell out the answer.

How to use it

Choose the Alphabet and type the Text; the symbols appear as you type. Pictures can be saved with Download SVG (22 symbols to a row), and Braille, runes and Greek can be copied as text. Characters an alphabet has no symbol for are shown as they are.

To read a message, click the matching symbols under Read symbols in order (with Space between words), and the letters build up in Reads as, which you can edit. For Braille, runes and Greek you can instead paste the symbols into Text, and what they read as appears below. The alphabet is remembered in the browser, and Copy a link to this input keeps the alphabet and text.

Example

Choose Try an example, which writes Meet at noon in pigpen: M is a square open on the left with a dot, E is a closed square, and T is a V on its side. Choose Elder Futhark runes instead and it’s ᛗᛖᛖᛏ ᚨᛏ ᚾᛟᛟᚾ.

Good to know

Pigpen comes in several layouts; this is the common one (A–I in a grid, J–R in a dotted grid, S–V in an X and W–Z in a dotted X). Runes and Greek are letter-for-letter swaps, not translations: C, K and Q share one rune and one Greek letter, so they read back as k, and runes have no separate V or Y. Braille is uncontracted (grade 1), with numbers and common punctuation. Semaphore and flags cover letters only, not their numeral signs. Hexahue writes a space as an all-white or all-black block, which is left as a gap here; its other punctuation was never fixed, so only . and , are drawn. The Hexahue chart follows dCode’s (dcode.fr).