[sw-l] SWDB - Linguistic SignWriting Database

[Sandy Fleming]

Val wrote:

> Stephen Slevinski wrote:
> > For Sign Maker, I converted all of the IMWA images to black & white.
> > I then
> > converted the white to transparent.  So the images that Sign Maker
> > uses are
> > actually black and transparent.
>
> I see. I am sorry if this was extra work for you. While I was making
> the GIFs, I could have chosen a transparent background. There were also
> other choices, like trimming each symbol to be tight...namely no space
> at all around the symbol, except for the symbols that have holes on the
> inside of the symbol...that would be transparent....Actually the
> trimming can be done in batches...automated changes, in Photoshop, but
> 25,000 GIFs are a lot of symbols to trim, and to make transparent, but
> I will be happy to do that...So the question is...What should come
> first? Fixing the current GIFs of the IMWA, or adding the new symbols?
> And should I do the new ones in the transparent trimmed method, while
> leaving the others in the old format? That might be very confusing for
> programmers and will screw us up...smile...

Val, I've thought of a good way of doing this without changing the IMWA at
all.

As you were saying, even if we changed the IMWA, the SW software displaying
the signs would still have to do something to make the layers
distinguishable somehow, such as outlining the top shape.

This still leaves us some problems - it's wouldn't help much with the BSL
sign for England, for example, where only the fingers overlap.

However, an even simpler solution for the programmer, and probably more fun
for the readers and writers too, would be to allow the different layers to
be different colours. Since we have to do something like this anyway,
there's really no need to change the IMWA.

The attached gif shows some examples. I've chosen black for the top layer
and mid-grey for the bottom layer, as is only sensible for people like me
with black and white printers! Perhaps I should ahve made the grey a little
darker, but never mind - a good sign processor would allow the user to
choose his "main" font colour as well as his "low" font colour.

"England" and "defend" look the same whichever version of the IMWA we use.
"Work" looks different so I've given both versions.

It seems to me that it works well either way, although the new-style IMWA
would be slightly clearer for some signs.

The solution with the current IMWA seems satisfactory to me, though. So
perhaps all we need to do is update SWML to add a z-layer (perhaps as a
number so that if someone felt there was a need to have more layers, it
could be done). Then the current IMWA will do, and Stephen and other
programmers have the choice of implementing z-layers in their software, or
ignoring them.

More advanced software could even calculate the overlaps and make the upper
layer look opaque, so even if you want the opaque effect, it doesn't mean
you need to change the IMWA. Of course, you might still _want_ to update the
IMWA, just to make life easier for future programmers, but no doubt future
programmers will produce all sorts of versions of the IMWA to make their own
software look better - perhaps that's not your job any more, Val  :)

The important thing for now is to provide the z-layer information in SWML,
to make all these things possible.

Sandy
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