At time of writing, the latest draft proposal about
additional Egyptian hieroglyphs is L2/16-079 “Preliminary draft for the
encoding of an extended Egyptian Hieroglyphs repertoire” http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16079-hieroglyphs.pdf
by Michel Suignard, dated 2016-04-11. This is the latest of several iterations
by Suignard, the first of which was a preliminary draft L2/15-240 dated 2015-10-09.
An important part of this proposal is a database containing basic
information about each of the encoded hieroglyphs. This database to be
maintained on the Unicode website. Over 6000 additional hieroglyphs are proposed
in addition to the 1071 hieroglyphs encoded in Unicode already and this basic
data should make it reasonably straightforward for software tools, fonts and so
forth to work with the expanded repertoire.
There are a number of open issues for discussion in the
draft proposal. I hope to write on some of these topics in future blog posts.
One point I’d like to make now: many of the additional
hieroglyphs first appear in the Greco-Roman period so it is likely that fonts and
tools aimed at classical Egyptian from Old Kingdom to New Kingdom omit or
downplay these additions. In fact, for much use of digital hieroglyphic writing
systems I suspect popular fonts will contain at most hundreds of additions to
the current Unicode standard set rather than thousands. Time will tell.
I’m not personally involved in developing this proposal but
agree with the overall aim to enrichen Unicode support for hieroglyphs. I don’t
know what the thinking is on timescales for completing the proposal but don't see any reason it can't be finished this year. So it seems to me that if Egyptologists or others have ideas that might help
improve what is being proposed, the time to be helpful is to communicate what you have to say during Summer 2016.
Bob Richmond
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