SOFTWARE development, symbolsets

[Charles Butler]

How many SW-EDIT users is immaterial, or how many SW-DOS users is also immaterial.  We should not be creating new SW generators unless they are capable, by their nature, of  taking legacy programs as well as IMWA.   
 
That should be an absolute in creators of a keyboard for SW.   The DVORAK and the QWERTY keyboards still map to the Roman alphabet, no matter where the keys are.  
 
Very basic question, was SW-DOS written in SWML or not, is it a graphics generator, or not?  Did it take individual bit maps and move them across the page, or not.  There were things that I could do in SW-DOS in terms of fine tuning, that I could do with a keystroke, that I cannot do with a mouse in SignPuddle.  
 
I agree, I don't know how much a grant would be to get some creative programmer to work solely on the legacy SW-DOS program and move it forward to IMWA, but it has become necessary.  To force hundreds of people who have been typing in SW-DOS and tell them they are going to have to reenter every sign that they worked on so diligently in learning the keyboard really seems a backward way to go, and frankly, it won't happen.    
 
There must be an easier way.  The whole purpose of SWML recognition programs, I thought, was to make it easier to generate signs, not make it more difficult.  
 
It's going to take a character generator programmer sitting down and comparing locations a lot, but that is no harder than moving data in any multi-language keyboard.  If the Indians can do it back and forth between the Roman alphabet, the Sanskrit alphabet, the Tagalog alphabet, and the Arabic alphabet, it cannot be impossible, just painstaking.
 
Valerie, or Stuart, could someone give us an estimate of cost on something like this?  In terms of actual programming hours, are we talking $100 a chacter times 96 x 5000 = $4,800,000 or somewhat less.  (I'm giving a wild estimate to presume that it takes $100 to change one old SW to its corresponding IMWA character in placement in the new order, multiplying that by 96 rotations, and that times 5000 current characters in IMWA).  
 
There must be a way to do it, and not be a lottery ticket fortune, or you lose legacy any time you upgrade, and that is just plain wrong.
 
There also really ought to be a way, or maybe SW-EDIT does this, that is still actual keyboarding, so that a keystroke is a keystroke is a keystroke.  If I push the X key it generates a character, if I push the comma key, it rotates it.  It may take a while to add character layers to the keyboard, but then it's a matter of remapping, not completely upsetting the keyboard anytime a character set changes.
 
Charles Butler


Stuart Thiessen <sw at PASSITONSERVICES.ORG> wrote:
I was planning to use it for one project, but this very issue of 
migration blocked me from using it more actively. I did have some 
documents in SW DOS, but I haven't actively used it much because I am 
still waiting to see how to migrate forward. I don't want to have to 
re-enter information from SW-DOS just to get IMWA. That is my major 
block.

Thanks,

Stuart

On Oct 17, 2005, at 11:30, Valerie Sutton wrote:

> SignWriting List
> October 17, 2005
>
> On Oct 17, 2005, at 9:13 AM, Stuart Thiessen wrote:
>> Besides, we need to be able to migrate SW-Edit files anyway to IMWA 
>> at some point. We can't expect everyone to re-enter data when 
>> programs change. That tends to block people from using any program 
>> because they are afraid their data won't transfer to the next 
>> version.
>>
>
> I wonder how many people use SWEdit on a daily basis...SignWriter DOS 
> has thousands of files to be converted...but I do not know how many 
> SWEdit users there are...are you one, Stuart?
>
> Val ;-)
>
>
>


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