Application priorities for the Hieroglyphs Everywhere Project

From my personal experience using Unicode for Egyptian Hieroglyphic, three priorities for useful applications have emerged.

1. Bridging the gap between traditional methods of encoding digital transcriptions of Egyptian and the Unicode techniques available or emerging. This way Egyptologists, students and other users of existing applications and content are not forced to switch to some new system but can choose to use Unicode only where this is found helpful.
2. Using Unicode methods to provide better ways of exploring encoded transcriptions of hieroglyphic text. This opens up new insights into the hieroglyphic writing system in ways that are interesting for experts and casual users of the script alike.
3. Simplifying methods of writing Egyptian in Hieroglyphs. Traditional input using codes, menus and so on works but can be time consuming. Simplified input will be helpful to scholars and students. It is an essential part of making the writing system accessible to casual users.

Of coiurse, this is nowhere near a complete list of useful tools for working with a newly available writing system

If you are working in any of these (or other, related) areas, I’d be delighted to hear from you and can add a link to your work and/or applications from www.hieroglyphseverywhere.net if you choose.

For HEP itself the initial focus is on web applications. This is all about the ‘everywhere’ goal. Web apps can be devised to work on the billions of devices from phone to desktop PC that already contain reasonably up to date web browsers. Nevertheless, store apps or downloadable applications for a more limited range of devices can be extremely useful. Information and links will be featured on the web site.

For illustration, here are three fairly sophisticated applications I wrote for personal use that fit into this picture. I’d like to adapt and convert these into HEP web apps accessible to a wider audience if there is sufficient interest and I can find the opportunity to do the work.

• Manuel de Codage (MdC) Reader for Unicode.  MCRU has recently proved very useful for me both for Unicode plain text development and checking elements of the EGPZ2 specification. MCRU reads MdC texts in traditional encodings from applications such as InScribe, JSesh, MacScribe and WinGlyph. Uses include proofreading MdC texts and conversion of MdC to and from Unicode.
• An Interactive Egyptian dictionary with English-Egyptian, Egyptian-English using hieroglyphs or transliteration. My earlier prototype version of this was online for a while around 3-4 years ago. The current version has roughly twice the number of entries compared to the useful Vygus PDF dictionary some readers may have used but use of Unicode, search and other forms of interactive exploration are probably the most interesting features.
• Plain text ‘Notepad-like’ editor for plain text hieroglyphic. An interesting feature is a ‘swift input’ method for keyboard/mouse or touchscreen input using predictive text to speed up and simplify the writing process.

To be clear, there are no release plans for these apps at present but I wanted to mention them to show what is possible.

Bob Richmond

Introduction to the Hieroglyphs Everywhere Project

The Hieroglyphs Everywhere Project is an initiative to help make the Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic writing system widely accessible and useable over the whole range of modern digital devices, applications and web sites.

The name 'Hieroglyphs Everywhere' originates from the title of my presentation to the meeting of Informatique et Egyptologie, Oxford way back in 2006. Michael Everson and myself were present at the meeting to elaborate on the potential benefits of Unicode for Egyptology and discuss in detail our proposal to add basic Egyptian Hieroglyph characters to the Unicode Standard.

These 1071 Egyptian Hieroglyph characters became part of the Unicode Standard in 2009 with the release of Unicode 5.2. Web browser and other application support for the new Unicode features slowly perculated into the digital landscape so now hieroglyph characters are indeed widely available on many modern devices from phones, tablets, desktop/laptop PCs and even video games consoles.

However there is more to a writing system than characters. Hieroglyphs were and are written in groups, not one after the other:

Five years after the characters became available in Unicode it made sense to take the next step to enable grouping of hieroglyphs in Unicode Plain Text so hieroglyphic can be used as a fully functional writing system. This step is a topic for a future blog post but in short the necessary additions were proposed last year and are now recommended for inclusion in Unicode 10 (release Summer 2017), subject to consultation with national standards bodies.

Hieroglyphic can be of casual interest, feature as a small part of a young persons education or simply used for fun. At the other end of the scale there are exacting requirements of Egyptologists and other scholars or students of Ancient Egypt.

To bring hieroglyphic to life is a fairly demanding task. There need to be suitable fonts, tools for working with hieroglyphs and resources, topics to feature in this blog. Producers of web browsers, Operating Systems and office software need encouragement and support if we are to avoid repeating the slow rate of progress after Unicode 2009.

As the first output of the project, some technical resources including reference fonts are being published on www.egpz.org to help working with Unicode elements not in the standard. Such as an additional 5000 specialized hieroglyphs. The aim is to complete this rollout by end of the month.

The www.hieroglyphseverywhere.net web site is also under construction during the next month to set the scene for what is needed and provide some example material. Right now there are no timescales beyond this goal although it is highly desirable to make solid progress by the time Unicode 10 goes into Beta at the end of the year.

Offers of support to help move HEP forward would be greatly appreciated.

𓋹𓍑𓋴

Bob Richmond