[sw-l] SignWriter DOS & future programs...

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
December 12, 2004

Stefan Wöhrmann wrote:
> Big sigh that people stopped to care about the problems with SW44 -
> and the
> folks that still are aboard on a sinking ship!? ( the dictionary does
> not
> allow more than almmost 11 000 entries ) ( Hi Sandy, Stephen, Adam,
> Trevor,
> Stuart and the Brazilian crew and the other teams around the world
> please
> forgive my impatience -


Dear SW List and Stefan -
Yes, I can understand your feelings about SignWriter DOS...It is a good
program and it is a shame that DOS is an outdated operating system. I
am so glad that Windows 98 still exists so we can continue to use it.
But it is a program frozen in time, and most likely will not change.
Instead programmers are re-writing new programs from the
beginning...because computer languages changed so enormously in the
past decade...It is hard to re-program the old DOS code to hold more
than 10,000 signs...But SignWriter DOS may be revived later, if
SignWriter Tiger is finished in Switzerland someday...SignWriter Tiger
can read all SignWriter DOS dictionary files and I am hoping there will
be no limit to dictionary size. It is taking longer than expected, but
Tiger is still alive and in development...

Did you know that the Flemish programmers, Steven Aerts and Bart Braem,
developed a way to take a SignWriter DOS dictionary and automatically
turn the whole dictionary into 10,000 pngs? That conversion program is
built into the web dictionary software they developed. Would you want
to convert your dictionary into pngs, Stefan, in a fast way? I can
write to them to ask them if we could do that. Then your 10,000 pngs
could be loaded into SignBank, blending with other large
dictionaries...or even become a web-dictionary, like the Flemish Sign
Language Dictionary....

So there is no limit to dictionary sizes in modern programs like
SignWriter Tiger, SignBank, SignPuddle and the Flemish Dictionary
software...

Val ;-)