ASL Fingerspelling Compiler Project ;-)

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
December 15, 2010

To update the SignWriting List....

Things keep changing rapidly, but here is a summary of what happened so far ;-)

Meryeme and I just had a conversation on Skype. It is a miracle that we can visit like this, on computers, when we actually are on the other side of the world from each other. It is a pleasure to meet you, Meryeme ;-)

I told Meryeme about the computer project in Tunisia. It is here:

SignWriting in Tunisia
http://www.signwriting.org/tunisia/

WebSign Avatar Project using SWML
http://www.signwriting.org/tunisia/tunisia01.html

and we discussed Meryeme's computer project in Morroco, which is a C++ compiler (small project) on Linux, only using American Fingerspelling symbols in SignWriting...that is why the Sutton US TrueType Fonts are useful:

Download Fingerspelling Fonts
http://www.signwriting.org/catalog/sw214.html

So because this is a school project, but not a thesis of any kind, it cannot involve anything other than ASCIII characters, and so our Fingerspelling Fonts do act like another typeface, or alphabet-design, when typing English. For people to be able to read what someone wrote using the ASL Fingerspelling Font, they will need to install the Sutton US font into their system fonts on their computer, but once it is there in the list of fonts, then any paragraph can be selected and changed over to the ASL Fingerspelling symbols.

Only problem is...if you send that message to someone else, who does not have the Sutton US font installed, then of course the paragraph will show up in another typeface, like Helvetica, or Arial or whatever - so the only way to keep it in the SignWriting symbols, is to take a screen capture of the paragraph and create a graphic of it and attach it as a graphic, like the attached.

So the Sutton Fonts are fun, but for serious long-time use of SignWriting, we use other programs... For Meryeme's smaller project, I hope the fonts will be useful. I also explained that the symbols are available in SVG format, and also .PNG and .GIF, on the SymbolBank web site, in folders with all symbol in them - SymbolBank: http://www.movementwriting.org/symbolbank/

It might be a little overwhelming to try to find just the symbols used for fingerspelling in those large folders, so it might be better to just create your own graphics for each symbol in the Sutton Fonts, in a graphics program like Photoshop or InkScape -

Thanks for your time today - keep us informed, Meryeme - We are happy to help - and best of luck with this interesting project - Val ;-)


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