SVG and Unicode

[Stuart Thiessen]

See my comments below ...

Stuart

On May 1, 2007, at 9:10, Steve Slevinski wrote:

> Unicode
> -----------------------
> MovementWriting in general needs a Unicode platter of 56 thousand  
> symbol places.  Each symbol should get it's own space, or be  
> logically combined some how.  It's going to be political to get a  
> new platter opened, but the existing 256 spaces in a nearly full  
> platter are not enough.

My contacts who work with non-Roman scripts assure me that there is  
no problem with getting space for SignWriting. That is not the main  
issuel. The biggest issue is deciding what should appear in the slots  
and what should be handled by the renderer. In addition to that, we  
will have to convince them of our method of rendering SignWriting  
(whatever that ends up being). I strongly believe we will have to do  
some unique things to make SignWriting work with Unicode compared to  
the way most spoken languages are rendered in Unicode today. So that  
will be a greater issue than the number of symbols. My conversations  
with my contacts indicate that x/y coordinates may not be well  
received. So I am exploring other alternatives to x/y coordinates for  
symbol placement. Also, whether it is on existing planes or a new  
plane, we will have to see what is available when our proposal is  
ready. My initial efforts will be focused on SignWriting proper. But  
I agree that a strong case exists for bringing in all of the Movement  
writing symbols.

>
> Unicode and SVG
> -----------------------
> Once each symbol has a unique number, we can create font files for  
> SignWriting.  We may be able to have a single font file, or we may  
> need multiple font files.  Since we'll already have the SVGs  
> completed, we can use the SVG style fonts.  This whole process will  
> be repackaging.  There should be automated tools that can help.   
> Maybe even font experts..

I believe that it should be no problem to contain all the symbols in  
one font file. After all, they have font files with nearly every  
writing system included that are several megabytes in size. It may be  
that our font file has very minimal support for spoken languages and  
only contains movement writing symbols.

Thanks,

Stuart