SignText email - how many symbols in URL allowed

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
October 26, 2006

Stefan wrote:
> Look at my workshop. A nice group.
>
> Question: What is the issue?
>
> Question 2:Who will become the most skilled SW reader of this group?

CHARMING! I giggled and laughed to see so many wonderful faces  
smiling at me when I opened my email. Thank you, Stefan, for your  
wonderful SignWriting Art!


> I am on my way to get more and more familiar with SignText. Writing  
> long documents with SignWriter44 is no problem- smile. But I am not  
> able to write long documents in SignText? Each time I try to send a  
> email with some dialogs, a number of phrases I get a message URL  
> too long -- kind of that.
>
> Is there a rule how many sybols are allowed in one message?

NOW it is time for me to teach you how to do a document with  
SignText! We do them all the time!

SignWriter DOS could not do documents written in vertical columns  
with Lanes, so even though it had other advantages, it is not a  
program I would personally use today. SignWriter DOS took over 10  
years of software development. That is why you could do so many good  
things with it, like creating long documents in SignWriter DOS....it  
takes time to develop software programs. Steve has been working on  
SignPuddle and SignText only a few short years...but within another  
year or two, it will far exceed any features that SignWriter DOS ever  
had....

Right now, in SignText, we can create one long sentence at a time. We  
bookmark that sentence (save that sentence). Then we start a new  
sentence, like a new document, and we bookmark that sentence. And  
then the next and the next and the next. So you have maybe 10  
bookmarks that save 10 long sentences. Then you create a PDF that  
puts all ten sentences together....the PDF becomes ONE document and  
you have full and very long SignWriting documents, all in Lanes...

For example, Cherie Wren has been translating and writing the Cat in  
the Hat story, in SignWriting in ASL. There are at least 16 bookmarks  
for the story at the moment, but it can be placed into one long PDF  
at anytime...

Let me get a cup of coffee, and I will be back to explain more...

Oh...there are two other things I must tell you....

1. Punctuation is always placed in the Center Lane...even when you  
are writing in the Left Lane or the Right Lane...the Punctuation has  
to be in the Center Lane at all times to help the reader know where  
they are...

2. A horizontal line under a sign, when writing in vertical columns,  
means a hypen -  like this -  so underlining your name, when you  
wrote from left to right in SignWriter DOS did not hurt anything,  
because when you write from right to left it didn't mean anything  
else because a hyphen is vertical in that case, but now that you are  
writing down, the horizontal line means something else...it means a  
hyphen...so you need to find another way to mark a Proper Name when  
writing vertically...I personally see no need to mark a Proper Name  
because I can see that it is a Sign Name pretty easily without any  
underlining, but anyway, if you must mark that we need to find  
another way to do that when writing vertically...why not use a color  
to mark the Proper Name for your students? You can color signs,  
before creating the PDF in the PDF feature...so you could make all  
Proper Names red or green or whatever color you want!

Now that cup of coffee...wish you could join me!!

More soon...

Val ;-)