Hieroglyphs on the web: Egyptian hieroglyph character picker

A recent web application for working with Unicode hieroglyphs is an Egyptian hieroglyph character picker (EHCP) by Richard Ishida; the latest in his collection of Unicode character pickers on http://r12a.github.io/.

Technical note. EHCP uses Unicode hieroglyphs for most purposes but hieroglyph group rendering follows the WikiHiero method of image arrangement (see my earlier post Hieroglyphs on the web: WikiHiero). One difference is EHCP replaces the WikiHiero PHP code (which runs on the remote server) with JavaScript code that runs in the local web browser instead. Two benefits of JavaScript are 1. better performance in many circumstances and 2. No need to restrict the software to PHP server pages.

The EHCP application is at http://r12a.github.io/pickers/egyptian/ with documentation at

http://r12a.github.io/pickers/egyptian/help/.

EHCP is useful for experimenting with Unicode. It is not intended to be a fully-fledged hieroglyphic editor. Once Unicode plain text hieroglyphic is available it should be very straightforward to modify EHCP to work with plain text hieroglyphic fonts and eliminate the need for WikiHiero hieroglyphs as images,

Bob Richmond