SIGNWRITING SYMPOSIUM 2014
PRESENTATION 11

ABSTRACT

The SignPuddle Standard for SignWriting Text
by
Stephen E. Slevinski, Jr.
Software Developer of SignPuddle,
SWIS, & Sign Language Wikipedias
slevinski@signwriting.org

‪For concreteness, because the universal character set is not yet universal, and because an international standard for the internet community should be documented and stable, this I-D has been released with the intention of producing an RFC to document the character use and naming conventions of the SignWriting community on the Internet.‬

The SignWriting Script is an international standard for writing sign languages by hand or with computers. From education to research, from entertainment to religion, SignWriting has proven useful because people are using it to write signed languages. The SignWriting Script has two major families: Block Printing for the reader and Handwriting for the writer.

The SignWriting Text encoding model defines the structures of SignWriting Block Printing. The plain-text mathematical names are explained with tokens and regular expressions patterns.  The visual image is supported with SVG and PNG generated by a SignWriting Icon Server. An experimental TrueType Font is available.

Formal SignWriting strings define a lite ASCII markup to name each sign logogram. The text is defined with regular expressions. The included query language defines several productive searching possibilities. The transformation from query language to regular expression is defined.

For Unicode, the current use of the Private Use Area font characters is documented.  A character proposal for plane 1 is included that is isomorphic with the characters that are currently used by the community.

Three appendices discuss additional topics to the standard. The first discusses the Modern SignWriting theory and example document, stable since January 12, 2012.  The second discusses the symbol encoding of the International SignWriting Alphabet 2010. The third discusses the SignPuddle Standards: licenses, infrastructure, and compatibility.