SVG symbols

[Sandy Fleming]

Hi Jonathan,

Firstly, I apologise for spelling your name wrongly in my original
posting!

I did those two SVG files by hand, in order to see how complete
SignWriting texts could be produced in a structured fashion in SVG form.

You'll have seen how they first define all the simple geometrical shapes
required, then put these together to make SSS symbols, then put these
symbols together to make whole signs, then put these signs together to
make the whole document.

You'll notice also how I produce "shadowing" to show the respective
depth of the symbols, generating the shadow automatically (although I
now think it would be better to scale the shadow up slightly, rather
than drawing it slightly displaced).

And also how I seem to need four different colours to draw the signs!
One for the strokes and palm fills, one for the ordinary fills, one for
the background and one for the shadowing. None of this seems necessary
when writing on a plain background, but when writing on a pattern or
picture background, these are important to make the SignWriting readable
in the face of interference from the background picture.

I haven't written a program to create these, however. This would be
quite a big project, what with the large number of symbols to be defined
and so on, and thinking about how to do this has taken me a long way
from this starting point.

So while I think we can learn a lot from these files (I know I did), I
don't think it's actually what we want: we would do a lot of work, and
we'd end up with a program that can take some sort of input and produce
SVG. That seems a bit limiting to me.

After working with this and giving it a lot of thought, I think I have a
much better idea of what we need. I'd just like to ask you to be a
little bit patient while I set it up a description of it on my website,
with the appropriate license!

Thanks for taking an interest in this, by the way: without that it might
have taken me a long time to decide that it was time to go public with
these ideas!

Sandy

On Mon, 2007-04-30 at 22:21 -0600, Jonathan wrote:
> Hi Sandy,
>     I had a look at your SVG files,  if we did all the symbols like you
> did yours, there would be as you said dramatic savings.  I was
> wondering, do you hand code the document or do you have a program to
> help you organize all the parts?
>     I know you are away on holiday, I hope to can get back to me when
> you get back.
> 
> Jonathan