Rotations

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
June 6, 2004

Steven Aerts wrote:
> It is the meaning of the rotation key wich is in stored within the
> files.  We
> have attached a diagram with a few examples why we call it the
> "rotation
> madness". We think our proposition is much more transparent.  And
> writing the rotation
> in degrees doesn't mean you allow a user 360 degrees of freedom.

Dear SW List, and Steven!
Thank you for your messages...

What you call Rotation madness, is partly historic...there were reasons
and restrictions on us, before that we do not have now...but then there
are other VERY important reasons why hands rotations are not the same
as shoulders...so the purpose of computer programs is not to change
SignWriting or DanceWriting, which is written by thousands of people
around the world, but to instead do our best to give people a way to
type the way they write by hand...

Having said that, some of your points are well taken...So let us take
this one category at a time...Let us take hands first...

The hands are consistent now with rotations, in SymbolBank. Every
handshape, whether it is a basic square for a fist, or a complex
handshape...they all have 16 rotations as shown in the previous
diagrams...8 counter-clockwise and 8 flopped and clockwise.

But unfortunately, back in 1986, when I first started entering symbols
into Rich's SymbolEditor on the Apple //e, Rich was trying to keep the
memory usage very very low, so he was trying to find ways of not using
up too much memory....so some of the symbols in the different rotations
are significant for sorting dictionaries by SSS...but in those days we
were not sorting by SSS yet...so Rich deleted a lot of the symbols that
looked visually redundant to save memory...So in some of the symbols
from the older symbolsets...like SSS-1995, and even in SSS-1999..those
were based on another kind of programming...let me show you...please
see the attached...

This is a screen capture from the Symbol Editor I used to enter the
SSS-1999. As you can see, I would enter the symbols in a bit map
editor, but I didn't enter all rotations and flops myself...those were
programmed by Rich inside the SignWriter program...so it looks like we
have fewer rotations than we really do...But they were all really
there, but programmed in as flops of each other and so forth...

There were several symbols, like the basic square for a fist that were
honed down to two positions only, because then there was no visual
redundancy, but that actually hurt us later, when it came time to sort
by SSS...ironically the user has no problem with the visual redundancy
when reading SignWriting, and those different rotations are needed for
spelling and sorting by sign-symbols...that is another subject - ha!

Anyway, to make a long story short, Rich Gleaves had a different
definition for each category of symbols...we didn't call them
categories then, but he had a definitions pull-down menu in this symbol
editor, and when I entered a movement symbol, or a handshape, I would
have to tell the symbol editor which kind of a symbol was, so that the
programming would somehow know how that category was defined...

Meanwhile, back to the present day...now SymbolBank records all 96
flops and rotations, not assuming any special programming...That is
hands...Next message will be movement symbols...Val ;-)

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