Greetings,
I'm looking for advice on text layout for SignWriting. SignWriting is
used for sign languages. It is an unusual script with unusual requirements.
The glyphs of SignWriting are related to sight, rather than sound. While
the sounds of a voiced language occur one after the other, the sights of
sign language can occur at the same time. The spatial relation is
written rather then the temporal order.
There are a large number of glyphs: 37,811. I have a file system based
font released under the open font license. I have a Unicode proposal
that uses 674 codepoints on plane 1. 3 proposed Unicode characters
identify a symbol. I have renamed each glyph SVG according to the
proposed Unicode character sequence. An automated import should
automatically build the font.
http://www.signbank.org/iswa - ISWA 2010 HTML Reference
http://www.signpuddle.net/iswa - ISWA 2010 Font Reference
http://www.signpuddle.net/plaintext - Symbol Encoding with characters
Each word occurs in a separate 2-dimensional Cartesian coordinate space.
Each word has a defined center at the point (0,0). The words are aligned
based on their center. The words can be aligned top to bottom, or left
to right.
The basic idea of the script is that for each word, the writer chooses
the symbols and the writer chooses the symbol positions. Standardized
rules determine the center. There is no internal structure to the
positions. Symbols are positioned in relation to the center rather than
relative to other symbols. The coordinates for each symbol represent the
top, left of the symbol glyph.
As a formal language, each word can be divided into the plain text of
symbols and the rich text of spatial layout and temporal annotation. The
plain text of symbols will be represented with proposed Unicode
characters. The rich text of spatial layout and temporal annotation will
be represented with a lite markup using ASCII characters and number
digits. A regular expression can identify Formal SignWriting words.
There are several issues that complicate layout. I have been solving
these solution on the server side with PHP or on the client side with
JavaScript. Would it be possible to use HarfBuzz to work with a lite
markup and plane 1 characters to display SignWriting text?
Here's an example:
Aπ‘πͺπͺπ¦πͺπͺπ¨πͺπͺM27x37π‘πͺπͺn28x11π¦πͺπͺn2x7π¨πͺπͺn19xn38π¨Ύπͺπͺn19xn38
I believe I am nearing a stable open standard for SignWriting. The
Internet Draft I released earlier this year is very close. Based on feedback
I've
received on the I-D, I have a revision planned that clarifies Formal
SignWriting as
plain text and rich text. The next revision should be stable for the
foreseeable future.
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-slevinski-iswa-2010-00 (Jan 2011 draft)
I would like to solve this at the appropriate level. It appears HarfBuzz may
be the right level.
Any advice or ideas?
Thanks for your time,
-Steve
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