[Sw-l] Working towards additional hand shapes for SignWriting

[Stephen Slevinski]

Hi SignWriting List,


I need your opinion and ideas.


For SignWriting 2020, I outlined a few work projects and where efforts 
could be made.

https://signpuddle.org/projects.html 
<https://signpuddle.org/projects.html?fbclid=IwAR3A7lZBW3SX1wXH-kCNnlvCdEqtSqesQOqq_ysywAhDKRkW21nEx1HT5lg>


It looks like people are serious about additional hand shapes. The ISWA 
2010 has 251 different hand shapes already. Not all of them are used. 
Valerie documented all of the hand shapes she knew about and added the 
ones that were requested and she added a few more that might be used 
some day.


In theory, there are hand shapes that are close enough. Because of pride 
and love, if a writer needs a certain hand shape, then they should have 
that hand shape.


The easiest way to accommodate additional hand shapes is to find current 
hand shapes that aren't used and simply overwrite them. This simple 
change would create the ISWA 2020. It is a multi-stage process and will 
take some time, but it wouldn't complicate processing and it wouldn't 
break existing software.


I would need to create new fonts and we would be done. Unfortunately, 
all of the ISWA 2010 hand shape references would become outdated.


The ISWA 2010 is a 16-bit character set, which is over 60,000 code 
points. The code space is full.

I like the idea of an ISWA 2010 Extension as an additional 16-bit 
character set. For whatever year, we would publish new characters and 
fonts for additional hand shapes or perhaps a dance writing extension.

Long term, I would love to do the ISWA 2010 Extension, but for this 
project I think we should overwrite a few of the unused hand shapes to 
create the ISWA 2020.


Your thoughts?

-Steve


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