The Egyptian Hieroglyphic writing system is inherently polychromatic. The colour or colours used for individual hieroglyphs involve naturalistic, symbolic and conventional characteristics adapted to the materials or pigments available to the artist/scribe. For the most part, hieroglyphs were coloured consistently in a single painting or inscription. Conventions were used, for instance green is associated with growing plants and life, blue the sky and primeval flood. These characteristics of hieroglyphic makes it possible to envisage coherent polychromatic fonts with useful applications.
Symbol & Magic in Egyptian Art (R. H. Wilkinson, 1994), Chapter 5, provides a good introduction to Egyptian use of colour.
Hieroglyphic will be the first intrinsically chromatic Unicode writing system. It is important, however, to be clear that Unicode itself and its hieroglyphic content do not define chromatic features. This is done by systems built on Unicode such as CSS/HTML web standards, typically using the OpenType font standard for text rendering. Modern versions of web browsers such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge/Internet Explorer, and Mozilla Firefox already implement font technology to work with basic polychromatic, mainly thanks to the popularity of colour emoji.
Once hieroglyphic writing system additions are available in the Unicode standard there can be little doubt that polychromatic will dominate casual use of hieroglyphic. Hundreds of millions of children around the world encounter Egyptian each year as part of their education and colour makes hieroglyphic more comprehensible and interesting. This situation will benefit Egyptology since it will encourage digital industries to support Unicode hieroglyphic in their products. There are questions such as how far to scope casual hieroglyphic but the earliest this widespread deployment could begin is Summer 2018 so there is ample time to experiment with options and discuss details before a universal font rollout.
The situation with polychromatic for scholarly applications is different. Monochrome hieroglyphic has 150 years of publications to inform on strengths and weaknesses of transcriptions but there is no tradition of polychromatic typefaces at all. There are obvious benefits of colour such as hieroglyphs which look similar in monochrome yet have distinctive colour in paintings. Birds G001 ꜣ 𓄿 and G004 tyw 𓅂 are good examples. Nevertheless in the short term I expect most Egyptological work to continue to focus on monochrome. This principle also applies to implementation of Unicode hieroglyphic fonts and the methods, resources and tools for working with the next generation of hieroglyphic technology where there's a lot still to do. Incidentally, hieratic transcriptions that follow traditional use of red and black ink in hieratic do not need polychromatic fonts. Nevertheless if you are producing a book, thesis, museum website or the like aimed at the 2018/19 time-frame it is not too early to consider whether or how polychromatic hieroglyphic might be used to advantage.
My own work on polychromatic began with the simple question: is it technically feasible at the current state of technology? For a long time the answer has been no. As recently as January, when the Unicode hieroglyphic writing system was expected in 2017, polychromatic seemed best left to the second stage of development when technology was slightly further ahead. However, one positive result of the delay to 2018 is it now proves possible to bring polychromatic forward by a year for use by specialists (as noted above widespread deployment should wait on the standards process).
Hieroglyphic fonts are fairly complex to develop. Polychromatic adds more technical complexity. To simplify the first font I decided to focus on two aspects. 1. Use in a dictionary application and 2. software user interface (UI). This reduces quadrat layout and chromatic complexity, for instance I could ignore vertical writing and the tall or complex quadrats needed in some transcription scenarios. This is still a work in progress but I hope write more on the topic during 2017.
Bob Richmond
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