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

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
April 28, 2020

Hello SignWriting List, and Steve -

Thank you for this message. What a new and ingenious idea - to overwrite hand symbols that are not being used with new ones that are needed - that could be a game changer - a way to have new handshapes without changing the number of handshapes -

And I just looked at your site:

SignWriting 2020
https://signpuddle.org/index.html <https://signpuddle.org/index.html>

That is quite a site! Chock full of information for everyone - Thank you for dedicating time to this -

And the projects are clearly described - I hope some of you can help with them -

SignWriting 2020 projects
https://signpuddle.org/projects.html <https://signpuddle.org/projects.html>

I look forward to the discussions -

Val ;-)

_________


> On Apr 28, 2020, at 7:16 AM, Stephen Slevinski <slevin at signpuddle.net> wrote:
> 
> 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 Unfortunately, all of the ISWA 2010 hand shape references would become outdated.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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sutton at signwriting.org

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