SignWriting and Unicode

[Stuart Thiessen]

Just my 2 cents worth. I'm by no means a Unicode expert. But I think  
the simple answer to your question is that standards are standards for  
a reason. They make it easier for everyone to be on the same page.

Prior to Unicode, everyone did fonts and encoding according to  
whatever scheme they thought worked best. That resulted in documents  
which couldn't be read unless you had the right font files and other  
tools to read and write those documents. That led to confusion.

With Unicode, it is much easier to have documents with mixed languages  
and mixed characters sets because everyone has agreed on a standard  
for representing the written characters for that language and how that  
language is to be displayed. To facilitate widespread adoption of  
SignWriting (or any writing system) on the computer side, it is wise  
to work with Unicode.

Otherwise, I would suspect that SignWriting will forever have to  
kludge its way to make the writing system available in other products  
not created by SignWriting personnel. As a result, software companies  
will be far less likely to make SignWriting something that could be  
used natively in their applications. This in turn makes it less  
attractive to those who are using standard applications for their work.

Developing a way for SignWriting to work in Unicode is admittedly not  
trivial, but I do believe it is possible and valuable for those who  
want to use SignWriting in any program.

Stuart

On May 5, 2008, at 14:07 , Steve Slevinski wrote:

> Unicode acceptance would be great, but I'm not sure what problem it  
> would solve that the x-iswa-2008 does not solve.

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