Sutton SignWriting

SignWriting.org SignWriting Stream Gitter Chat Email List Facebook Group Wikipedia

The Sutton SignWriting script is the universal and complete solution for written sign language, ISO 15924 script code "Sgnw". It has been applied by a wide and deep international community of sign language users. Sutton SignWriting 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.

Formal SignWriting is one particular computerized design for Sutton SignWriting. Formal SignWriting envisions a sign as a two-part word of time and space. Each word is written as a string of characters that can be recognized and processed by regular expressions. The design has been optimized for display, searching, sorting, text flow, and other character processing.

www.Sutton-SignWriting.io is a website of information and resources about the Sutton SignWriting script and Formal SignWriting technology.

Source Package Distribution Download

Specification

The Formal SignWriting specification is a faithful encoding of Sutton SignWriting that is documented in an Internet Draft submitted to the IETF.

Text HTML XML PDF HTMLized Bibtex

Characters

Any sign can be written as a string of characters. Formal SignWriting has two sets of characters that can be used: Formal SignWriting in ASCII (FSW) and SignWriting in Unicode (SWU). These sets are isomorphic with an easy bi-directional conversion between the two sets.

Description	FSW Characters	SWU Characters
Sequence Marker	A	U+1D800
Signbox Markers	B, L, M, R	U+1D801 to U+1D804
Numbers	250 to 749	U+1D80C to U+1D9FF
Symbols	S10000 to S38b07	U+40001 to U+4F428

Character Sets FSW Demo FSW Symbols SWU Demo SWU Symbols

Fonts

The TrueType Fonts can be used without installing the fonts on any platform with font-face statements. Simply include the following CSS in any HTML page to access the fonts.

@font-face {
  font-family: "SuttonSignWritingLine";
  src:
    local('SuttonSignWritingLine'),
    url('https://unpkg.com/@sutton-signwriting/font-ttf@1.0.0/font/SuttonSignWritingLine.ttf') format('truetype');
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "SuttonSignWritingFill";
  src:
    local('SuttonSignWritingFill'),
    url('https://unpkg.com/@sutton-signwriting/font-ttf@1.0.0/font/SuttonSignWritingFill.ttf') format('truetype');
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "SuttonSignWritingOneD";
  src:
    local('SuttonSignWritingOneD'),
    url('https://unpkg.com/@sutton-signwriting/font-ttf@1.0.0/font/SuttonSignWritingOneD.ttf') format('truetype');
}

If the fonts are installed, then the system fonts will be used. If the fonts are not installed when a SignWriting Font page is opened, the CSS will cause the fonts to be automatically downloaded to the browser's cache on the first visit. Once the fonts are installed in the browser cache, they will remain there until the browser cache is emptied. Any webside that uses this CSS can access the browser installed font without requesting a new copy. The fonts are 18 MB, so the first page view make take a few seconds or longer depending on your download speed and processor.

Reference Development Source Distribution