The SignPuddle Standard for SignWriting Text
Stephen Slevinski · 2016
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. Formal SignWriting uses ASCII strings to name logographic signs. The mathematical names are explained with tokens and regular expression patterns. Symbol keys reference the symbols of the International SignWriting Alphabet 2010. Coordinates define X and Y number values for 2-dimensional placement. Signs are written in a spatial SignBox, where each symbol is positioned with a 2-dimension coordinate. For sorting, each sign can have an optional temporal sequence of symbols that is outside of the SignBox and the visible text. To create sentences, completed signs are written sequentially, interspersed with punctuation symbols. The query language of Formal SignWriting uses a lite markup, similar to FSW, to define a variety of searching possibilities. The spatial SignBox can be searched for symbols or ranges of symbols. For each symbol or range, the search can specify if the symbol only needs to be found somewhere in the SignBox, or if the symbol needs to be found near certain coordinates. The temporal sequence can be searched for starting symbols, written as a sequential list of symbols and ranges of symbols. When searching the temporal sequence, the search results will be limited to signs that start with a matching temporal sequence. Each query string is transformed into one or more regular expressio ...