cistercian

cistercian

Commandline tool to generate Cistercian numerals.

The medieval Cistercian numerals, or "ciphers" in nineteenth-century parlance, were developed by the Cistercian monastic order in the early thirteenth century at about the time that Arabic numerals were introduced to northwestern Europe. They are more compact than Arabic or Roman numerals, with a single glyph able to indicate any integer from 1 to 9,999. Digits are based on a horizontal or vertical stave, with the position of the digit on the stave indicating its place value (units, tens, hundreds or thousands). These digits are compounded on a single stave to indicate more complex numbers.

Installation

go get github.com/rhardih/cistercian

Example usage

Text

$ cistercian 7323
    ╷
    │╲
    │ ╲
    │  ╲
────┤
    │
    │
    │
╷   │
│   │  ╱
│   │ ╱
│   │╱
└───┘

SVG

$ cistercian -svg 5221 > 5221.svg

Result: