Binary SignWriting and Unicode

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
November 30, 2007

Wow...this is amazing, Steve. Thank you for your hard work, and for  
this message explaining it!

2008 will be an exciting year...

I just have two Ethiopian handshapes to add, and then I will have the  
handshapes for the ISWA ready...then I need to work on the arrows and  
circles...people want choices of larger arrows and circles ;-)

So the ISWA work is going well, so we can release it in 2008...

Regarding terminology...I think we need to follow the Unicode  
terminology...as you can see on this web page, the term "character"  
is what Everson uses instead of the term "letter", and I am guessing,  
but I believe their term "symbol" stands for symbols for punctuation  
and other symbols needed to write with, but the symbols are not an  
alphabetic character....

Universal Character Set (UCS)
International Standard ISO/IEC 10646-1 and computer industry  
implementation Unicode
http://www.signwriting.org/forums/software/unicode/unicod00.html

And trying to follow that terminology will become complex for  
SignWriting, because in other writing systems a character does not  
flop and rotate...so I thought we could call our BaseSymbols (around  
500 basic symbols) "characters" or "letters" and the flops and  
rotations could be called "symbols"....

Just a thought...but it is not a big deal to me...just as long as we  
are writing signed languages, the terminology in the hearing world is  
not very important

I am going back to working on the handshapes!

Have a great day everyone -

Val ;-)

----------







On Nov 30, 2007, at 9:00 AM, Steve Slevinski wrote:

> Hi list,
>
> There's been renewed interest in Unicode lately.  I think the main  
> reason to use Unicode is to reduce size.
> I have a proposal for Binary SignWriting that will integrate with  
> Unicode.  The specifics may change, but the basic idea offers a lot  
> of promise.  http://signpuddle.net/index.php?id=Binary%20SignWriting
> This will be an open standard that will work with SignText and  
> replace the other markups and formats.
> As an example, consider the following section from "The Cat in the  
> Hat" by Cherie Wren.
> http://www.signbank.org/SignPuddle1.5/canvas.php?ui=1&sgn=5&sid=130
> This has 164 letters (or symbols) from the SignWriting alphabet;  
> has 28 words (or signs) and is displayed using 7 image columns.
> Here's the size breakdown:
> Image Columns: 23 k
> SWML: 10k
> Binary SW: 0.64k
> This is a tremendous saving.  Binary SW has a nice hex  
> representation and it can be used in files, online, and databases.   
> Binary SW integrates well with either font files or the current  
> image files.  It's compatible with Unicode and the current  
> SignText.  It can use style sheets for presentation.
> There will be several types of SignText plugins: client (FireFox  
> plugin), server (PHP and Ajax), and application (python, visual  
> basic, ...).  All will use Binary SW with the new ISWA.  I'll be  
> releasing the plugins as open source under the GPL on  
> SourceForge.net.  If you want to participate in the coding, send me  
> an email discussing your interest.  2008 is going to be a fun year.
> The specifications will be appearing on my site http:// 
> www.signpuddle.net as open standards and proposals.  I'd welcome  
> any comments, feedback or alternative ideas.
> Regards,
> -Steve
>
>
>
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