Refining the idea for the SignWriting proposal

[Stephen Slevinski]

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