An update regarding SignWriting and Unicode

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
June 10, 2011

THANK YOU, Steve, for giving our SignWriting List an excellent summary of the 2011 events regarding SignWriting and Unicode. This is a beautiful summary for our SignWriting List historic Archives. And many thanks to all those who were involved with bringing SignWriting this far in the past 37 years...Val ;-)

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On Jun 10, 2011, at 7:44 AM, Steve Slevinski wrote:

> Greetings SignWriting List,
> 
> Encouraging news regarding SignWriting and Unicode.
> 
> From Wikipedia: Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode
> 
> There are many reasons and benefits why SignWriting should want to be part of this standard.
> 
> There are 2 governing committees for the Unicode standard: UTC and WG2.  Both committees must approve any proposal before it becomes part of the Unicode standard.  Michael Everson presented to both committees this year.
> 
> Last month, Michael Everson presented to the UTC.  He received some valuable feedback and updated the proposal accordingly.
> 
> This month, Michael Everson presented to the WG2.  You can find the proposal document online:
> http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n4090.pdf
> 
> The WG2 presentation went very well indeed.  He was given a great deal of time to present and discuss the proposal.  He had many very good questions from technical experts.  The discussion continued after the meeting and into dinner. He said that everyone was really positive and supportive regarding the proposal.
> 
> The committees meet twice a year: the next UTC meeting is in January 2012 and the WG2 in February 2012.
> We are hoping to be included on the ballot after the next meetings.  We are not on the ballot this time because the committees felt they needed time for a comprehensive review.
> 
> This is a great step forward.  As Michael said, "We can be very pleased indeed."
> 
> Regards,
> -Steve
>