mulberry-symbols

The Mulberry Symbols are collection of pictograms / symbols / icons designed for AAC users who rely on graphics symbols for communication with others. They include more unusual symbols, including many suitable for adult AAC users. The symbols are freely usable, sharable and modifiable having a liberal Creative Commons license. Thus they are perfect for using in on-line applications as there are no license fees to consider.

The symbols are provided in Scalable Vector Format (SVG) so they look good at any size. We've always preferred this format and it is now readily usable on the web and other platforms. If you want a fixed size raster image there are various SVG tools that allow you to convert to the resolution that you require.

See mulberrysymbols.org for more details

Developing

This is a typical npm/node managed package. A source of complexity, especially in releases, is due to the symbols and the website being in the same repo.

Several npm scripts are provided in package.json

1. test - checks the symbols names against the symbol-info.csv
2. build - build everything
3. build:zip - generates the .zip for distribution
4. build:categories - generate categories-xx.pdf and catagories-en.html

NB building the HTML require puppeteer which currently does not work on WSL on Win 10 (it might on Win 11).

If you want to develop the website locally follow the instructions on Githubs docs

Releases

Currently this is a manual process. The following updates the zip and category files ready for the release

1. Update the version number in package.json
2. Commit and push everything so merged to master on GitHub
3. Execute npm run build to build the zip and categories files
4. Make a GitHub Release with Tag of v<RELEASE NUMBER>, adding release notes
5. Add the zip to the release
6. Add categories-xx.pdf to the release
7. Add categories-en.html to the release
8. Add symbol-info.csv to the release - this gets generated manually from a master Google Sheet
9. Announce the release
10. Perform git pull to get the release tag locally

Updating the website assets

The website references files in the latest release so this may need to be built first. The website files are found in the docs folder and the README becomes the home page. Any changes pushed to master cause the website to be regenerated and published.

Contributors

Thanks to the following people for helping to improve the Mulberry Symbols

• @austin94
• @gavinhenderson
• @shayc