Monday 16 January 2017

Establishing the next Expansion of the Egyptian Hieroglyph Repertoire in Unicode

As I noted in my previous post, 2016 saw progress in identifying methodologies along with lists of candidate hieroglyphs for inclusion in an expansion to the 1071 already available in Unicode since 2009, I expect a formal proposal for an initial expansion set to emerge this year, probably for release in the Unicode 11 (2018) or Unicode 12 (2019) timescale.

Note: announcements and discussions on Ancient Egyptian and Unicode now take place on the "Egyptian Hieroglyphs in the UCS" mailing list (see blog post Informatique et Égyptologie - Cambridge - 2016 for link and comments).

Also, it is now possible to check your Manuel de Codage (MdC) documents (from JSesh etc.) online for hieroglyphs currently missing in Unicode. See my October post MdC analysis for Unicode Repertoire Extensions. I hope to keep this up to date during the next few months as Unicode proposals firm up.

Finally. There is much potential for hieroglyphic already in Unicode now the script has become better supported in recent years by advance in font technology, web browsers, word processors and so on. I hope to see substantial progress this year. As far as the repertoire is concerned I personally use a systematic way of working with hieroglyphs not yet in Unicode and hope to publish details and resources about this system when I'm comfortable it works well alongside expected developments of the formal standard though 2019. Meanwhile I'd be pleased to hear from others working with expanded repertoire in Unicode so we don't duplicate work. Thanks.

Bob Richmond

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