Unicode Hieroglyphs in web browsers: Web Fonts

I outlined the situation with hieroglyphic for general purpose web pages in an earlier post Unicode Hieroglyphs in web browsers: generic web pages. This note outlines another way of presenting Unicode hieroglyphs on a web page designed for Egyptian.

Web fonts are fonts that are requested by web pages for download (if necessary) for use on the web page. WOFF (the Web Open Font Format [Wikipedia]) is the international standard for packaging web fonts. All popular browsers have supported WOFF since 2010. Browsers may still support older schemes for 'font embedding' for compatibility issues with old web pages but for the vast majority of web sites WOFF should be used and the older schemes avoided.

Web fonts are especially useful for web pages that want to make use of specialist writing systems without having to rely on the writing system being fully supported on your device in order to read the page. They are therefore potentially useful for Egyptian Hieroglyphic in Unicode.

Some useful points to be aware of.

• Web fonts are compressed and usually 'cached' on the local device so they need not be downloaded each time they are used. This is especially useful and efficient for mobile devices.
• Browser software usually needs to be enhanced every time the Unicode standard is updated as relates to a specific writing system. This will affect progress during introduction of the hieroglyphic writing system.
• Services such as Google Fonts can supply identical fonts to a wide range of web sites. Google Fonts is easy for web site developers to use, and only a single copy of the font needs to be downloaded for sharing among sites that use it. For Egyptian Hieroglyphs the recent delays in Unicode standardisation and the cost of creation and release of suitable Google Fonts means this route will probably be impractical for some time unless there is adequate support for the process.
• Fonts can be provided on an individual site basis. This is the short term approach to be adopted for the Hieroglyphs Everywhere Project web site which also hopes to provide the tools to enable other sites to do the same once the Unicode standard is updated. The same approach could be adopted for a large web site such as Wikipedia.
• If you copy hieroglyphic from a web page that uses a web font to another application (or web page), that application (or web page) will need to have access to the same (or similar) font in order to gain a satisfactory result. This is no different to any writing system but less obvious in the well-supported systems such as the Latin-based scripts used for English and other popular languages . 

Much can be said on technical aspects of web fonts so I'll likely return to the topic when there is more use of Egyptian Hieroglyphic in Unicode on the web.

In order to set the ball rolling on hieroglyphic web fonts I've created a Browser Test Page for Hieroglyphic in Unicode development. This page uses a web font with a feature to get around the fact that the hieroglyphic writing system is not yet available in Unicode (we have 1071 hieroglyphs but control characters for quadrat arrangements are still being delayed). You can use the page to confirm your web-browser is working correctly. (If there are problems on specific devices I'd like to hear about them so this can be resolved or documented to inform others in a similar situation. Thanks.)

Bob Richmond