[sw-l] Downloading the IMWA and SSS-1999

[Trevor Jenkins]

On Fri, 10 Dec 2004, Sandy Fleming <sandy at FLEIMIN.DEMON.CO.UK> wrote:

> Trevor wrote:
>
> > Nothing wrong in that. ;-) One would expect it to grow as the notation
> > develops. What it does need is for applications such as Stephen's to have
> > an efficent storage method. If the elements of the IMWA is stored as
> > individual files then the user loses a whole bunch of disk space
> > unecessarily.
>
> Yes, one way would be to store it a zip file and let the program extract
> from in as it needs them.

If the IWMA is stored in a zip file and the program code is in Java then
there is a natural congruence because of jar files. (Thoe who don't know,
and I wish I didn't, jar files are used with the Java programming language
to contain the executable versions and the jar format is nothing more than
a version of zip. Not sure of the exact details I think it has more to do
with named files being present than with encoding/decoding schemes.)

> ...  The program would work more slowly because it has
> to do the extraction, but it would only have to extract once per gif/png so
> it's not bad at all - with good programming, it would work well.

As an aside I'd prefer to have the glyphs stored in a resizable format
such as SVG than in PNG/GIF/JPEG, vector rather than pixel based. (Stored
lines rather than dots.)

> ... It's still an awful lot to ask a user to download for his
> distribution however. The reason Stephen can use the full IMWA is that
> it's a Web-based application so he doesn't have to ask the user to
> download the whole IMWA - it's stored on the server for them.

True.

> Another solution is to store the components of the symbols rather than the
> whole symbol. Then we can have rules for creating symbols from the
> components.

SVG?

> Val's solution of having an IMWA subset for each language is still probably
> the best. A programmer can always opt to improve on this by storing symbol
> components from his subset instead of whole symbols if he wants.

As an ex-programmer looking to use IWMA for his signing I personally would
still need to have more than one subset. Stuff I've done recently involves
lexical borrowings (typically from ASL but I've just had to think about
NZSL and AUSLAN to name but two) into BSL.

> Ultimately I think the answer is in fonts, although there are also
> distribution problems with large fonts!

Long time since I had anything to do with ISO's font people (they speak a
very different language to the rest of us :-) so I'll refrain from
discussing that point ... for the moment. ;-)

Regards, Trevor

<>< Re: deemed!