Happy Birthday to Steve Slevinski ;-)

[Stephen E Slevinski Jr]

Hi Val, Erika, Charles, Stefan, Maria, and others,

Thanks for the Birthday wishes.  I enjoyed collaborating with everyone 
in 2012 and all the years before.

I look forward to 2013 with great hope and anticipation.  The ASL 
Wikipedia project is a spearhead for SignWriting text.  For some 
minority languages, a Wikipedia is the largest collection of text for 
that language.  I'm confident this will be true for some sign languages 
as well.  This year, we will complete the infrastructure and I'm hoping 
that Wikimedia will officially accept request for sign language projects.

I promised Val a technical report. I have the first half finished. I'd 
like to send it to the list.

The overview is on SignPuddle.com
http://signpuddle.com

The efforts to standardize SignWriting continues.  The character 
encoding is covered in draft-slevinski-signwriting-text.  A technical 
document and a companion to the Modern SignWriting (MSW) theory and 
example document.  The first public draft of MSW was released one year 
ago.  The character encoding has been stable since release.  Happy 
Anniversary.  The RFC Editor is currently finding reviewers with the 
intention of publishing my Internet Draft as an RFC through the 
Independent Submission Editor model (RFC 6548).

Our server side fonts are fully developed with PNG and SVG.  Server side 
fonts will always be available for platforms that do not support client 
side fonts for SignWriting.

Our first release of a client side font should be available later this 
year.  I'm hopeful that the few remaining issues will be settled soon.  
Imagine, viewing SignWriting in an office suite without special 
programming.  Many thanks and encouragement to Eduardo Trápani.

For the SignWriting Icon Server, character and image processing is fully 
developed.  I am currently working on the API to support public 
queries.  I'll prepare a demo to explain when it is functional.

The SignWriting Icon Client is desperately needed.  A modern editor for 
the modern character encoding will complete the offering.  This is the year.

Happy New Year to everyone,
-Steve