WORLDPAD and GRAPHITE Programs by SIL

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
June 17, 2004

Dear SW List, and Steve Parkhurst:
Many thanks for the two CDs on the WorldPad and Graphite Computer
Programs, by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL)...

I have viewed the QuickTime introduction video on the CD...it was
really interesting! The SIL has developed a computer program called
GRAPHITE, that is used to write languages that are not that well-known
in computers...It is SIL's way to record not-so-commonly-used writing
systems...a very nice QuickTime introduction to the idea behind
it...The Graphite display of unusual scripts is coupled with another
program called WorldPad, that is a specialized word processing program
that can accept the unusal scripts in the Graphite program...so they
work together...

This reminds me a little of another computer program called NisusWriter
on the Mac years ago, that did some special insertions of unusual
scripts, in the middle of Roman Alphabet documents, back in the
1980's...

I know Al Bickford, Steve Parkhurst, Stuart Thiessen and others have
considered incorporating SignWriting into this new kind of programs, so
that has been an ongoing discussion behind the scenes...I believe this
will be a place for UNICODE someday perhaps...

Anyway Steve, thanks for the CDs!

List Members...You can read more about this on the web:

WorldPad
http://fieldworks.sil.org/WorldPad/worldpad.html

Graphite
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?
site_id=nrsi&cat_id=RenderingGraphite

Val ;-)