Hieroglyphs on the web: SINUHE the Hierotyper

The SINUHE the Hierotyper project is about keyboard input and display/edit of Unicode hieroglyphic inside 'Office' and web applications. SINUHE combines an ingenious adaptation of Japanese input methods for typing hieroglyphic by So Miyagawa with a font implementing a version of Simplified Egyptian by Marwan Kilani.

The project website is here and project sources with some documentation on GitHub at https://github.com/somiyagawa/SINUHE-the-Hierotyper. It is well worth taking a look at their videos on YouTube such as such as SINUHE the Hierotyper: demo 1. SINUHE is an ongoing work in progress and you need to feel comfortable with downloading the files and getting elements to work if you want to try it yourself. If you have a medium-large amount of hieroglyphic to type, SINUHE is faster than traditional use of codes and sign palettes so worth considering.

Longer term it is likely that standard Egyptian Hieroglyphic input methods will become available in their own right so this Japanese scenario for direct typing into standard word processing documents and the like will no longer be necessary. However, I can't see this happening earlier than a couple of years from now after Unicode 11 is released.

Meanwhile, SINUHE gives a preview of the kind of thing to expect for input as we move beyond the first generation of digital hieroglyphic and the typical input methods and workflow of traditional MdC applications. Of course you will be able to continue using hieroglyphic editors including traditional MdC-based systems to transcribe hieroglyphic then convert to and from Unicode if you prefer.

The notion of Simplified Egyptian Hieroglyphic fonts has been around for quite some time but as far as I know this is the first system using the technique to be made generally available on the web. The neat part about Simplified Hieroglyphic is it can be used in much modern software. However a major problem with this approach to fonts is one font may render the quadrat structure of hieroglyphic text differently to another font unless there is an agreed standard to which fonts conform to. I therefore recommend that anyone thinking of making simplified fonts should work alongside the SINUHE project to maintain a common approach to hieroglyph sequence mapping.

I'm planning to support SINUHE text format conversion to and from the control character approach of the Unicode Standard for Hieroglyphic used in the Hieroglyphs Everywhere Project (HEP). The great thing about open standards is all software writers have the information to enable them to do the same thing if they wish.

Thanks So and Marwen for interesting discussions and your demos of the system in action.

Bob Richmond