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