the benefits of ELAN

[Mark A. Mandel]

#From: "Gerard Meijssen" <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>
#Hoi,
#I blogged a few days ago about SignWriting and the availability of the
#SignWriting
#Image Server<http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2008/05/beta-release-of-signwriting-image.html>.
#What is clear in the text is that they are going to apply for an Internet
#draft in order to improve the SWIS support. What I understand is that
#SignWriting is superior in relation to HamNoSys as it allows for the
#registration of facial expressions.
#
#I would love to see SignWriting to be included in UTF-8. There are two
#problems; there are 33563 symbols and this requires more then the pages
#reserved for it. The hope is that with SWIS it may be possible to speed the
#inclusion dramatically because of the way the technology behind it ...
#(SVG).
#Thanks,
#      Gerard

I can't believe that there are 33563 individual symbols in SW. I assume that 
these are combinations of a much smaller number of elementary symbols, in 
different spatial relationships -- a small enough set to include in UTF-8. It 
must be possible

 a. to write a way to code the relationships linearly, even if the result is not 
friendly to human readers (cf. ASCII-Stokoe, 
http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/~mamandel/ASCII-Stokoe.txt, for a solution of a similar 
though admittedly simpler problem)

 b. to build a rendering engine that will read the coded sets of elementary 
symbols and output them in the proper layout for standard presentation in, e.g.,
	- HTML
	- PDF
 	- LaTeX

 c. to also search the linear code (a) for combinations of interest
 
-- Mark A. Mandel
   Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania
 
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