Symbols

Pen Spinning Trick Directory employs many symbols to notate coordinates of spins of the pen and how to push the pen. In this section, I will show you the most basic symbols representing fingers or regions of the hand (Table 1).

TABLE 1 Symbols for notating regions of the hand

• Finger symbols, A, H, T, 1, 2, 3, and 4 represent the arm, hand, thumb, index finger, middle finger, ring finger, and pinky finger respectively.
• Side symbols, p, u, b, and l represent the palm or the palmar surface, upper side, back, and lower side of the finger respectively.
• "The upper side" of a finger refers to the nearer side of the finger to the thumb than the other, which is to say, "the lower side".
• There are some tricks requiring fingers from both hands to be successful, such as Two Finger Twirl. Later in PSTD is a prime, ', added to a region symbol to indicate that the finger is from the other hand.
• Symbol t, meaning the tip of the finger, may be included in the palmar surface of the finger, and so it is only used to emphasize that the pen spins on the very tip of the finger.
• Symbol ^s (superscript s), meaning the base of the region, is omitted in notating spin coordinates of Top spin tricks such as Shadow, and is added to a region symbol in notating spin coordinates of Backaround to emphasize that the pen spins around the base of the fingers.

We may now combine a finger symbol and a side symbol to form a region symbol so that we can precisely represent a corresponding region of the hand (Table 2). Spin coordinate in a trick infobox indicates regions of the hand where the pen spins during a trick using these region symbols. Nonetheless, a finger symbol may stll be employed individually in Mechanism of a trick infobox.

TABLE 2 All possible kinds of region symbols

• Region symbols, Ap and Ab represent the palm-up side and palm-down side of the arm resprectively.
• Region symbols, Hp, Hu, Hb, and Hl each represent the palm of the hand, the upper side of the hand or the lower part of the thumb, the back of the hand, and the lower side of the hand or the part of the hand to which graphite adheres after writing with pencil.
• Symbols, At, Au, Al, and Ht mean nothing, and will not be used.
• Also note that Hp^s, Hu^s, Hb^s, and Hl^s, as they are notated as the base of the hand, each indicates the corresponding regions of the wrist.