Wikipedia uses a simple technique to render simple
hieroglyphic on a web page by arranging graphics of individual hieroglyphs to
simulate the look of the hieroglyphic writing system. The Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration_of_Ancient_Egyptian
contains examples such as:
This feature of Wikipedia uses software called WikiHiero, first developed by Guillaume
Blanchard in 2004. This software is open source, licensed under GPL 2, and
continues to be maintained by various contributors.
Technical summary.
WikiHiero creates hieroglyph arrangements on a web page as bitmap graphics from
a source encoding that follows much of that part of Manuel de Codage (MdC) that
deals with hieroglyph encoding. The source of the web page contains elements
such as
<hiero>M23-X1:R4-X8-Q2:D4-W17-R14-G4-R8-O29:V30-U23-N26-D58-O49:Z1-F13:N31-V30:N16:N21*Z1-D45:N25</hiero>
(for the illustration above). These elements are converted into the arrangement
of graphics by the WikiHiero software running on the web server before the page is downloaded to a web browser. This process requires the web page is implemented
using PHP at the server and is therefore limited to web sites that use PHP such
as Wikipedia. See the WikiHiero home page at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:WikiHiero
for details.
In my opinion, the greatest strength of the WikiHiero design
is the fact that it generates web pages that work over a wide range of
web-browsers including many obsolete browser versions. This is a major benefit
for a web site like Wikipedia and other web sites built on sufficiently similar
technology.
The main downside of WikiHiero for simple hieroglyphic is the
fact that hieroglyphs are no more than graphics on the web page. WikiHiero
pre-dates Unicode hieroglyphs and has not yet been adapted for use with the
Unicode Standard. This means WikiHiero
hieroglyphs are not detected by search engines such as Google or Bing and Egyptian
hieroglyphic cannot be used in the same way as other writing systems in
Wikipedia.
Tip. If you
encounter WikiHiero hieroglyphic on Wikipedia and you want to copy the text
into a hieroglyph editor such as JSesh choose the [edit] option and you will
see the <hiero>…</hiero> encoding. You can then copy the MdC
content enclosed between the tags. Likewise, if you want to edit a Wikipedia
page you can add your own hieroglyphs by wrapping your MdC in a <hiero>…</hiero>
element.
Another potential benefit of WikiHiero I’d like to point out.
The implementation of <hiero>…</hiero> encoding ought to be fairly
simple to update to modern technology when the time is ripe. This means you
shouldn’t feel put off contributing to Wikipedia now if your Egyptian MdC content
works with WikiHiero. A future implementation of Wikipedia could elect to turn <hiero>…</hiero>
into Unicode hieroglyphic plain text rather than graphics. In which case your
content would ‘magically’ become accessible as text to search engines and so
forth. Text quality would improve considerably by the use of a font and
advanced typography rather than WikiHiero simplified layout of bitmap images.
Aside from its use in Wikipedia, WikiHiero has also been used
to implement a simple MdC editor. See http://aoineko.free.fr/index.php?lang=en.
This editor is also interesting in that it shows the detailed HTML encoding generated by WikiHiero from MdC.
Bob Richmond
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