Refining the idea for the SignWriting proposal

From: Stephen Slevinski (slevinski@gmail.com)
Date: Tue Jun 15 2010 - 09:51:27 CDT

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    Hi List,

    Just a few more minutes of your time...

    I will be dividing my SignWriting proposal into 2 parts. First,
    encoding the symbols of the ISWA 2010. Second, a technical note
    describing a lightweight SignWriting Cartesian Markup that can be used
    with the symbols for script layout.

    My proposal for encoding the symbols will require 674 code points.
    * 652 for the BaseSymbols
    * 6 for the fill modifiers
    * 16 for the rotation modifiers

    The SignWriting symbol set defines 37,812 valid symbols. Each of these
    symbols can be defined with 3 characters: BaseSymbol, fill modifier, and
    rotation modifier.

    There are potentially 62,592 character combinations, but not all are
    valid. Each BaseSymbol has a list of valid fills and valid rotations.

    A few examples...

    BaseSymbol 77 (U+1D852) , can be viewed by itself. A different glyph is
    displayed when followed by fill modifier 3 (U+1DA94) and rotation
    modifier 1 (U+1DA98) .

    BaseSymbol 136 (U+1D88D) , can be viewed by itself. A different glyph
    is displayed when followed by fill modifier 1 (U+1DA92) and rotation
    modifier 2 (U+1DA99) .

    All of the symbols are documented in the ISWA 2010 HTML Reference. This
    reference will be updated as part of the proposal:
    http://www.signbank.org/iswa

    It will be proposed that initially fonts have restrictions for size and
    shape. This restriction should be lifted if a scheme can be created
    that eliminates the requirement of exact symbol placement for proper
    script layout.

    Would such a proposal be close enough to the Unicode standard?

    Thanks for your time,
    -Steve

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