Presentations and discussions were almost entirely concerned with the hieroglyphic writing system in future additions to the Unicode Standard. The main areas of focus were:
- Expanding the Egyptian Hieroglyph repertoire beyond the 1071 hieroglyphs currently available in Unicode. The starting point for this discussion was Preliminary draft for the encoding of an extended Egyptian Hieroglyphs repertoire [pdf]. Technical questions were raised such as what should be treated as a distinct Unicode character and what might be dealt with some other way.
- Enabling Egyptian hieroglyphic in Unicode as a writing system with its signature arrangements of hieroglyphs in quadrats and groups. There was considerable interest in adding functionality beyond that given by Proposal to encode three control characters for Egyptian Hieroglyphs [pdf] currently under ballot.
- Input methods for Egyptian hieroglyphic.
A summary of the meeting by Debbie Anderson of the Script Encoding Initiative, Berkeley is available as Brief Report from Cambridge meeting of Egyptologists and Update [pdf].
Ongoing discussions following the meeting are taking place on the Egyptian Hieroglyphs in the UCS mailing list (see archives at http://evertype.com/pipermail/egyptian_evertype.com/). I'll try to deal with some of these follow-up activities in future blog posts.
If documents from presentations made at the meeting become available online, I'd like to link to them here. Let me know if or when anything becomes available. Thanks.
Bob Richmond
No comments:
Post a Comment