PROGRAMMERS: Typing SignWriting in Vertical Columns...

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
June 18, 2004

SIGNWRITING IN VERTICAL COLUMNS continued...

Placing Signs in Different Lanes
In SignWriter DOS, you can automatically center signs after they are
typed, with the Control-Home Key combination. When writing
horizontally, that is a nice feature, lining up all the signs
horizontally.

The current version of SignWriter Java is a program that was never
fully programmed, so it does not include all of the features I had
planned. In SignWriter Java, signs are typed like SignWriter DOS,
except they are typed inside a special Editing Box, which gives endless
flexibility for both the height and width of a sign. After the typist
finishes typing a sign in the Editing Box, they press Enter or Return,
and the sign is entered into the document. It had been my hope, to ask
the programmers of SignWriter Java, to make it possible for the typist
to tell SignWriter Java to place the sign in Lane 01, Lane 04 or Lane
05, when they enter the sign into the document. So like the
Control-Home keystroke in SignWriter DOS, that centers the
sign...Control-Home would still place the sign in the center, but now
it will be in Lane 01 for vertical writing, and Control plus the Rotate
Key would give you the choices of any Lane you wanted, from Lane
02-07...So there would be 6 taps possible on the Rotate Key to choose a
Lane. Since that was never programmed, I worked with SignWriter Java
the best I could, using the flexibility of the Editing Box to give us
vertical columns in other ways...See the end of the chapter for details
on unique ways to create columns.

By the way, the keystrokes do not have to be Control-Home, and
Control-Rotate, but those are the keystrokes that would be easiest for
SignWriter users who knew our old keystrokes....

Val ;-)
(who is going to bed and will continue tomorrow! ;-)