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Hi Albert,<br>
<br>
Albert Bickford wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:007901c8aedb$87481c60$1f00a8c0@byrd" type="cite">
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<div><font size="2">Unicode is a system for representing a character
in a very small number of bytes, on the order of 5-10</font></div>
</blockquote>
We are using a 16-bit coded character set called the x-iswa-2008. Each
symbol can be represented with only 2 bytes. You can view the code
pages for the x-iswa-2008. If all goes well, next year I will write an
Internet Draft so that the x-iswa-2008 can be accepted as an official
character set of the internet.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.signbank.org/signpuddle/swis/data.php">http://www.signbank.org/signpuddle/swis/data.php</a><br>
<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:007901c8aedb$87481c60$1f00a8c0@byrd" type="cite">
<div><font size="2">it is not necessarily the case that a Unicode
implementation of SignWriting would need to make room for 33,000+ new
symbols.</font></div>
</blockquote>
Unicode contains 16 planes. I think 10 of these planes are empty.
Each plane can contains a 16-bit coded character set. It's a perfect
fit for the x-iswa-2008.<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:007901c8aedb$87481c60$1f00a8c0@byrd" type="cite">
<div><font size="2">if a Unicode system was developed in which each
handshape was represented by only one "codepoint" (...), and there was
a second codepoint to represent the rotation and shading, then the
number of codepoints required would drop to probably in the range of
500-1000. </font></div>
</blockquote>
There are 600 BaseSymbols which could be encoded. A simple translation
from the 16-bit x-iswa-2008 to an 8-bit BaseSymbol encoding plus two
4-bit modifying codes (or a single 8-bit code) should be relatively
easy. I prefer a simple 16-bit code.<br>
<font size="2"><br>
</font>
<blockquote cite="mid:007901c8aedb$87481c60$1f00a8c0@byrd" type="cite">
<div><font size="2">Unfortunately, my impression is that most of the
people who have thought about SignWriting and Unicode have made the
assumption that each of the 33,000+ new symbols needs to correspond
one-to-one with a Unicode codepoint. <br>
</font></div>
</blockquote>
The 16-bit coded character set is the really important development.
The previous 18 character symbol name required 144-bits to represent a
single symbol. With the x-iswa-2008 we have a simple 16-bit ccs, we
have 2 way translation between character code and character name, and
we can check the validity of any character code.<br>
<br>
Unicode acceptance would be great, but I'm not sure what problem it
would solve that the x-iswa-2008 does not solve.<br>
<br>
Regards,<br>
-Steve<br>
<br>
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