Building Pictographs from a Tinker Toy Font
Here's an idea for a font that could be used to display and print simple pictographs or runes using 23 lowercase letters and 24 uppercase letters.
The segments represented by the lowercase letters "a" through "p" result in advancing the cursor position to the next grid space. The segments represented by the other lowercase letters and the uppercase letters leave the cursor unchanged. In that way, sequential letters from this set will display as overlapping line segments. The lower case "a" advances the cursor without drawing a segment. This is used both to advance the cursor after drawing overlapping segments using uppercase letters, and to provide space between succesive glyphs. The space bar advances the cursor two grid positions without drawing any segments, and would normally be used instead of "a" at the end of a glpyh.
Figure 2 gives a few simple examples of glyphs and the letter sequences used to display them using the font.
A Different Set of Tinker Toy Font Pieces
In this set only the lower case 'x' advances the cursor. All other characters leave the cursor unchanged so that as many segments as desired may be stacked in the same glyph space.
A few runic characters and their "spelling".
In addition to the segments shown, the uppercase letters V, W, X, and Y could be used to draw the equivalent of "fg", "gh", "hi", and "fghi" shortening the "spelling" of characters that use longer vertical lines. For example, The first character above spelled "fghixpqxp" could be spelled "Yxpqxp".