It is highly featural and visually iconic: the shapes of the characters are abstract pictures of the hands, face, and body; and unlike most written words, which follow a primarily linear arrangement, SignWriting is structured two-dimensionally.

[1] Sutton based SignWriting on DanceWriting, and finally expanded the system to the complete repertoire of MovementWriting.

[citation needed] Sutton notes that SignWriting has been used or investigated in over 40 countries on every inhabited continent.

Currently SignWriting is taught on an academic level at the Federal University of Santa Catarina as part of its Brazilian Sign Language curriculum.

Some initial studies found that Deaf communities prefer video or writing systems for the dominant language;[4] however, this claim has been disputed by the work of Steve and Dianne Parkhurst in Spain where they found initial resistance, later renewed interest, and finally pride.

"If Deaf people learn to read and write in their own signing system, that increases their self-esteem", says Dianne Parkhurst.

[citation needed] It is adopted in as many as 40 countries, among which are Brazil, Ethiopia, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Slovenia, Tunisia, and the United States.

[8] Also, Claudia Savina Bianchini wrote her doctoral dissertation on the implementation of SignWriting to write Italian Sign Language.

[9][10] In SignWriting, a combination of iconic symbols for handshapes, orientation, body locations, facial expressions, contacts, and movement[11][12] are used to represent words in signed languages.

Since SignWriting, as a featural script,[13] represents the actual physical formation of signs rather than their meaning, no phonemic or semantic analysis of a language is required to write it.

If an unbroken glyph is used, then the hand is placed in the vertical (wall or face) plane in front of the signer, as occurs when finger spelling.

A band erased across the glyph through the knuckles shows that the hand lies in the horizontal plane, parallel to the floor.

For the three vertical orientations on the left side, the hand is held in front of the signer, fingers pointing upward.

For the three horizontal orientations on the right side of the diagram, the hand is held outward, with the fingers pointing away from the signer, and presumably toward the viewer.

There are over a hundred glyphs for hand shapes, but all the ones used in ASL are based on five basic elements: A line halfway across the square or pentagon shows the thumb across the palm.

These basic shapes are modified with lines jutting from their faces and corners to represent fingers that are not positioned as described above.

Although there are some generalizations which can be made for the dozens of other glyphs, which are based on the circle and square, the details are somewhat idiosyncratic and each needs to be memorized.

This is overly exact: The ASL sign will work with any downward zigzag motion, and the direction and starting point of the circles is irrelevant.

For example, a square (closed fist, 'S' hand) with double solid bullets is the sign for 'milk' (iconically squeezing an udder).

Additional symbols are used to represent sign locations at the face or body parts other than the hands.

As such, there is no obvious linear relationship between the symbols within each sign box, unlike the sequence of characters within each word in most scripts for spoken languages.

Sutton orders signs in ten groups based on which fingers are extended on the dominant hand.

It can be stored as plain text anywhere and be replaced by signs with special programs such as the SignWriting Icon Server.

[17] There is also an experimental TrueType font that uses the SIL Graphite technology to automatically turn these sequences into signs.

Formal SignWriting uses ASCII characters to define the two-dimensional layout within a sign and other simple structures.

[22] With either character set (Unicode or ASCII), the spelling of a sign produces a word that the can be efficiently processed with regular expressions.

The Sutton SignWriting SignMaker (@sutton-signwriting/signmaker) is a sign editor that can be accessed directly, embedded in an iFrame, and downloaded.

[26] The usefulness of SignWriting in natural language processing was validated with a new method of machine translation that has achieved over 30 BLEU.

[27][28] The conversion of sign language video to SignWriting text is an emerging field with open source options.