Egyptian Hieroglyphs

KP Mawhood
KP Mawhood Posts: 296
edited February 2017 in Font Technology
Are there any alternative solutions to Wikihiero to create character subdivisions (e.g. 1 glyph below another glyph)? The unicode values are being input using r12a Egyptian hieroglyph character picker, as substitution for pixelated imagery.

Thanks :smile:
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Comments

  • Peter Constable
    Peter Constable Posts: 161
    There is work still in progress in the Unicode Standard to introduce control characters that can be used to compose complex Egyptian hieroglyphs from the atomic elements (those that are already encoded or the Ptolemaic additions that are in preparation). Common Unicode-based implementations won't appear until all of that is part of the Standard.
  • KP Mawhood
    KP Mawhood Posts: 296
    Thanks Peter, I fully appreciate that this is a work-in-progress. Does TD have any suggestions or comments on the output options available, or more options that I have missed?
    • MacScribe – does not install OS X 10
    • Wikihiero - pixel-based
    • HieroTeX
    • JSesh
    HieroTeX seems to have some of the best results.
  • KP Mawhood
    KP Mawhood Posts: 296
    Quite delighted by our third party typesetter's solution, SPi Global. Even if it is a hack – thought it'd be worth sharing. NB: This is still at proofing stages (subject to changes), and we'll be using IFAONCopte for the Coptic.

    Hieroglyphs_MS (before), with Hieroglyphs_Proofs (after).

    Our contact says:
    • The typesetting system (platform) used for this title is Adobe InDesign.
    • For the combination, we collect the characters from Glyphs and start combining them using the kerning option one after another referring the MS PDF (hieroglyphs images) and the characters are ensured by the proof readers and Quality Control.
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,229
    edited July 2017

    That looks pretty good, and in the absence of really intelligent shaping for Hieroglyphic layout a manual approach is going to provide the best results. It looks like the typesetters have done a good job preserving the underlying Unicode characters, although I'm unsure about the order of the characters in stacks (I don't know enough about Hieroglyphs to know whether stacks in horizontal text are read bottom-to-top or top-to-bottom).

    [EDIT: Boooo! TypeDrawers won't display the Egyptian Hieroglyph characters I copied and pasted from Katy's PDF.]

  • KP Mawhood
    KP Mawhood Posts: 296
    although I'm unsure about the order of the characters in stacks (I don't know enough about Hieroglyphs to know whether stacks in horizontal text are read bottom-to-top or top-to-bottom).
    @John Hudson  Yep, the order was the only thing I'd query.
  • Denis Moyogo Jacquerye
    Denis Moyogo Jacquerye Posts: 197
    Boooo! TypeDrawers won't display the Egyptian Hieroglyph characters I copied and pasted from Katy's PDF.

    Who needs more that 65635 characters anyway, right? 

  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,229
    Weirdly, when I paste hieroglyphic characters here, I can see them in the interface, but when I post the comment I don't get .notdef glyphs, which is what I would expect, but nothing at all. It's as if the characters are being flushed.
  • Khaled Hosny
    Khaled Hosny Posts: 289
    That is a bug in the MySQL database, when the data goes into the database it truncates the text at the first invalid character, but its definition of invalid characters is bogus. There was already a discussion about it here in the context of Emoji, but I can’t find it.
  • Denis Moyogo Jacquerye
    Denis Moyogo Jacquerye Posts: 197
    edited July 2017
    @Khaled Hosny http://typedrawers.com/discussion/1497/using-emoji-cuts-my-post-off

    I guess any supplemental character does the trick.
  • Peter Constable
    Peter Constable Posts: 161
    Booo! Unicode supplementary-plane characters have been around since Unicode 3.1 -- published over 16 years ago!
  • David Perry
    David Perry Posts: 23
    As I work with historic scripts in Plane 1, I continue to be surprised at the number of programs I encounter that still don't support supplementary characters, either at all or with serious limitations.   I recently tested a text editor that is advertised as very Unicode-friendly and aimed at multilingual users. It handles Indic scripts and lots of other complex things — but cannot deal with supplementary characters at all.  <Sigh.> 
  • Vasil Stanev
    Vasil Stanev Posts: 775
    edited May 2019
    I was reading a linguistic book and remembered this thread. Turns out other peoples beside the Ancient Egyptians and Sumerians used hieroglyphs and cuneiform. Are there some stylistic variatons of these two writing systems in Unicode? :)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieroglyphic_Luwian
  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,135
    Vasil Stanev said:
    I was reading a linguistic book and remembered this thread. Turns out other peoples beside the Ancient Egyptians and Sumerians used hieroglyphs and cuneiform. Are there some stylistic variatons of these two writing systems in Unicode? :)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieroglyphic_Luwian
    Meroitic was another language written using some Egyptian Heiroglyphs - a small number, used as an alphabet. The Luwian writing in your cite, however, is a completely different writing system; here, the word "heiroglyphs" is used as a generic term for a kind of writing system. Thus, Japanese kanji are also Chinese characters, but Blissymbols, while they might be called "ideographs", aren't symbols found in Chinese writing.
  • PabloImpallari
    PabloImpallari Posts: 806
    Someone who I cant remember the name, showed me a Hieroglyphs font at 2014 Automatic type Design conference in Nancy, France. I think it was the same guy that also presented another font covering all unicode glyphs as a frame by frame long movie. Someone may remember his name, and you can ask him. Hope it helps.
  • Dan Reynolds
    Dan Reynolds Posts: 176
    PabloImpallari said:
    Someone who I cant remember the name, showed me a Hieroglyphs font at 2014 Automatic type Design conference in Nancy, France. I think it was the same guy that also presented another font covering all unicode glyphs as a frame by frame long movie. Someone may remember his name, and you can ask him. Hope it helps.
    Maybe it was Pierre Fournier? https://anrt-nancy.fr/en/projects/hiero-glyphs/

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