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From:  Valerie Sutton Date:  Tue Sep 11, 2001  12:49 am Subject:  QUESTION: Vertical or Horizontal Writing?

SignWriting List September 10, 2001 QUESTION: >The material you sent me is all written in columns and most of the >works now is written in lines. Am I right? What should I tell the >people? ANSWER: My old DAC staff members (Deaf people who worked with me in the 1990's) felt very strongly about writing in vertical columns, and I agree 100%. I saw them take notes written in SignWriting, just for their personal use, and they wrote in vertical columns naturally...it is the natural progression of the vertical body to write in a vertical direction.... You can read about this on the web: The Importance of Writing Sign Language Down In Columns https://www.SignWriting.org/lessons/grammar/vertical/vert000.html Grammar Lessons Online https://www.SignWriting.org/lessons/grammar/grammar.html So writing horizontally or vertically are both acceptable, but vertical writing is preferable. Publishing in vertical columns will be the world standard someday. The problem is that the software has not caught up with this idea. SignWriter 4.4 can only type horizontally, and then later you can convert it to columns, with ColumnMaker. ColumnMaker is not a perfect program....it needs to be updated. But for simple files it works well... And although I have developed a system for typing SignWriting in vertical columns,(that I hope will be quick and visually direct)...we do not have funding to implement the new idea at this time ;-) So I am working on a database, developing a way for computers to search and sort by Sign-Symbol-Sequence at the moment... -- Val ;-> Valerie Sutton SignWritingSite: https://www.SignWriting.org SignWriting List Archives: https://groups.yahoo.com/group/sw-l/ To post a message to the SW List:

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