This is the first in what I hope to be a series of technical posts aimed at software developers interested in supporting the Egyptian Hieroglyphic writing system in their systems or applications.
Most Egyptologists and others interested in Hieroglyphic need not be aware of these technical details and can skip the topic.
Unicode has contained 1071 hieroglyph characters since 2009. Additional features to enable an actual writing system in Unicode was planned for Unicode 10 (2017) but these are on hold until some requests for specialist additions are clarified meaning the release is delayed to Unicode 11 (2018) or possibly Unicode 12 (2019). These possible additions affect detailed font implementations but do not change what needs to done to make an application capable of displaying Hieroglyphic when it becomes available.
I'm working on resources for 2017 to enable useful work to be done and software to be tested so a working software ecosystem already exists whenever the standard is formally released.
Two innovative aspects of hieroglyphic writing may be especially interesting to software developers.
1. Hieroglyphs are typically arranged in clusters
This is different to most writing systems where characters follow one after another. This feature means that hieroglyphic fonts are probably the most complex examples of OpenType and can potentially reveal bugs or deficiencies in the font processing software used by applications.
The web-browser situation is in pretty good shape. If you are developing web-apps for modern browsers there is probably little to be concerned about. Conversely one well-known development environment with only limited support for OpenType is Microsofts .Net-based Universal Windows Programs (UWP) system which at time of writing does not render complex fonts.
2. Hieroglyphic is the first polychromatic writing system in Unicode
Polychromatic fonts are mostly used for Emoji characters at present predominantly via up to date OpenType font support. They are supported in the latest versions of popular web browsers Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge/Internet Explorer. However even simple color Emoji are still missing from many other applications.
Polychromatic hieroglyphic fonts are capable of rendering in monochrome so support is optional in your application. However casual users of hieroglyphs will likely be engaged by color and the feature also has value for scholarly work. Polychromatic fonts may gain popularity for other purposes so support is something you might like add to your application road-map.
Many application developers will need access to suitable APIs to add polychromatic support to their application. Therefore at this stage I'm especially interested in hearing from developers of high profile applications and popular API libraries and can be contacted via http://www.hieroglyphseverywhere.net/Home/Contact.
Bob Richmond
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