Towards Unicode Layout

[Jonathan Duncan]

Hi Martin,
     I just finished giving your document a second read over.  I added 
some comments and remarks and hope that they will be insightful and also 
that you get back to me with some of my requests for clarification.

     For some time, I have thought that attaching symbol to symbol could 
add additional information to the SignWriting data.  I thought that it 
might be useful to explicitly state which symbols contact, or interact 
(for movement symbols) would be useful for automating avatar animation 
and also changing from one receptive to expressive viewpoints.  But I 
haven't because, defining attach points for all the symbols is more work 
than I can do by myself.  Then to make use of the information, we would 
need to create a new input mechanism (or a conversion routine and then 
have someone read them to see if the relationship were properly 
inferred) and new rendering engines, which are also a lot of work.  But 
the idea in itself is appealing.

Regards,
Jonathan

Author of SignWriter Studio

On 12/6/2012 9:02 PM, Martin Hosken wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> Just to introduce myself. I'm a script technologist with SIL who has been involved in a number of complex script encoding efforts, adding them to Unicode and producing implementations. I have been involved in the encoding of SignWriting off in the SignWriting in UCS list. It was suggested I join this list to engage more experts on SignWriting in the process of encoding SignWriting layout in Unicode.
>
> I enclose a discussion document with my current thinking on the topic. Warning. It's not an easy read. But I hope it will be worth your effort. If you are an implementer or interested in the technical aspects of how we might linearise a 2D writing system, then please do give it a read and give your feedback. Please also note that there is no intention to rush off and get this added to Unicode. As the paper states, we must do a proof of concept implementation first.
>
> For those of you who are experts in SignWriting. The key issue that this document raises (although it doesn't mention it much) is the question of spelling. When storing a set of symbols that make up a sign, if we want to be able to search for that set again, they have to be stored in a consistent order. The problem with this is that there are 3 different preferred orders:
>
> * keying order
> * sorting order
> * searching order
>
> Of these 3, the easiest to work around is the searching order. That's an implementation problem, which regular expressions can handle well. But the other two tend to fight each other. The question I have for you as a community is: can we regularise keying order and can we perhaps adapt the sorting order to be a little closer to the keying order. I have presumed that we can in the document, but it would be good if people could review that.
>
> Full disclosure: I am not deaf. I can barely read SignWriting and so will analyse some signs wrongly. I have probably done that in this document. It is entirely unintentional and would value the review.
>
> Yours,
> Martin

-- 

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SignWriter Studio <http://www.signwriterstudio.com/>

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