hanshape rotation by 45 ° needed

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
November 29, 2007

Hello Honza and Charles -
Thank you for this discussion, and certainly Charles has a  
point...handwriting is so flexible! If I were writing a symbol by  
hand, you can show varying degrees of dark and light and that gives  
you the in-between palm facings automatically...

And did you know that technically there are 10 palm facings when  
writing by hand? Not the 6 we have in computers...

When Rich Gleaves and I created the SignWriter Computer Program,  
first for the Apple //e and //c, and later for DOS, we had memory  
constraints. The computers in those days did not have the same kind  
of memory available, and so I was forced to choose the 6 most used  
palm facings out of 10, and even after doing that, we still had 96  
flops and rotations for one "character" or "letter" in the  
SignWriting alphabet...so there are a lot of symbols anyway, and I do  
not want to add the 10 palm facings now ( called Fills )

Imagine if we had all 10 palm facings...the amount of symbols would  
have been so much larger that it would have been impossible to type  
by computer...

So I had to make choices...I had to decide what was more important  
and what could be eliminated? so I eliminated the in-between palm  
facings creating the 6 we have today...and 99 per cent of the time we  
are writing just fine without those in-between palm facings...

Then years later, people asked me for the in-betweens of the flat  
hand, so I added them as "extra symbols" to the IMWA to help those  
who wanted them....but I feel those symbols could be improved...I  
write them differently by hand myself...

Right now, you can create the in-between palm facings yourself in  
SignPuddle...

Want to learn how everyone?

Val ;-)

-----------




On Nov 29, 2007, at 5:07 AM, Charles Butler wrote:

> In handwriting you can do almost any shading you want, the  
> programming to be adapted for all, or many of the other handshapes,  
> makes adding another 186 handshape orientations to the 6 x 96  
> already in existence makes it very difficult.
>
> Sometimes handwriting, rather than computer-driven, actually gets  
> you what you want when the current IMWA is not completely up to the  
> task.
>
> Charles Butler
>
>
> Honza <honza at ruce.cz> wrote:
> Hi Val and all,
>
> I have already written about this topic, but with no respond at all.
> As you know we use SignWriting in new dictionary that is being made  
> at University here.
> It is not always clear to write handshape in orientation "black",  
> "halfblack", "white".
> It allows only rotations by 90°, but in other directions it is  
> possible to rotate handshapes by 45°.
> So we need to rotate handshapes by 45°  in all directions .. is it  
> possible to make it somehow?
> I found there are just one handshape that allows this. -  it is  
> turned 45° to default.
>
> So if we combine this two orientations (se attachments) of one  
> hanshape we get rotations by 45°.
> Is it possible to do it at least in this way for more hanshapes?
>
> thanks
> Honza
>
>
>
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