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

Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) documents on Egyptian Hieroglyphic 2016

I thought it would be useful to compile a list of documents relating to Ancient Egyptian in the 2016 Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) document registry. I've added a few notes for explanation.

UTC meets every three months so I've included minutes of the meetings where Egyptian has been on the agenda. Only one formal proposal was made during the year but there were various drafts, discussion documents and comments about the hieroglyphic writing system and the hieroglyph repertoire.

Following the I&E Cambridge 2016 meeting in July, it was agreed that discussions on Ancient Egyptian and Unicode would take place on the "Egyptian Hieroglyphs in the UCS" mailing list (see blog post Informatique et Égyptologie - Cambridge - 2016). If you are interested in following progress or feel you have something to contribute to digital hieroglyphic developments at any level I recommend you join the mailing list.

I also hope to continue to track developments on this blog as the pieces of the puzzle come together this year.


January to March

• L2/16-018 Proposal to encode three control characters for Egyptian Hieroglyphs (revised); Bob Richmond, Andrew Glass; 2016-01-27
• L2/16-028 Preliminary draft of the extended Egyptian Hieroglyphs repertoire; Michel Suignard; 2016-01-21
• L2/16-037 Recommendations to UTC #146 January 2016 on Script Proposals; Deborah Anderson, et al; 2016-01-24
• L2/16-004 UTC #146 Minutes; Lisa Moore; 2016-02-01

Summary. The L2/16-018 proposal was a clarification of L2/15-123 "Proposal to encode three control characters for Egyptian Hieroglyphs (revised); Bob Richmond; 2015-05-04" addressing all feedback received to date. This proposal was put out to ballot as a UTC recommendation from meeting #146.

April to June

• L2/16-079 Preliminary draft for the encoding of an extended Egyptian Hieroglyphs repertoire; Michel Suignard; 2016-04-20
• L2/16-090 Comments on three control characters for Egyptian Hieroglyphs; Mark-Jan Nederhof, Vinodh Rajan with additional comments by Richter et al (TLA project) and a note by Polis and Rosmorduc (Ramses Project). 2016-04-25.
• L2/16-104 Observations: L2/16-090 [Egyptian]; Bob Richmond; 2016-05-02
• L2/16-121 UTC #147 Minutes; Lisa Moore; 2016-05-20

Summary. Glass, Nederhof, Richmond participated by phone in UTC discussion on Egyptian repertoire and controls at UTC #147. Detailed discussion continued at I&E Cambridge 2016 in July.

July to September

• L2/16-177 A comprehensive system of control characters for Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic text (preliminary version); Mark-Jan Nederhof; 2016-06-30
• L2/16-199 A suggestion ... for Ancient Egyptian; William Overington; 2016-07-21
• L2/16-210 A system of control characters for Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic text; Mark-Jan Nederhof, et al; 2016-07-25
• L2/16-204 Recently Closed Action Items (since 2016-05-05); Rick McGowan; 2016-07-25
• L2/16-214 An Extension to the three control characters for Egyptian Hieroglyphs and some additional remarks; Bob Richmond; 2016-08-01
• L2/16-216 Recommendations to UTC #148 August 2016 on Script Proposals; Deborah Anderson, et al; 2016-08-01
• L2/16-218 Brief Report from Cambridge meeting of Egyptologists and Update; Deborah Anderson; 2016-08-01
• L2/16-227 The Universal Hieroglyphic Writing System: Consensus and possible compromise; Bob Richmond; 2016-08-04
• L2/16-231 Proposal for Ancient Egyptian encoding in Unicode; Serge Rosmorduc, et al; 2016-08-04
• L2/16-233 Addendum to: A system of control characters for Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic text; Mark-Jan Nederhof, et al; 2016-08-05
• L2/16-203 UTC #148 Minutes; Lisa Moore; 2016-08-18
• L2/16-250 Preliminary proposal to encode Möller's Egyptian Hieroglyphs in the SMP (WG2 N4741); Michael Everson; 2016-09-14
• L2/16-251 Preliminary Mapping table of Möller's Egyptian Hieroglyphs (WG2 N4742 ; see also associated spreadsheet); Deborah Anderson; 2016-09-12
• L2/16-257 Source analysis of an extended Egyptian Hieroglyphs repertoire (Hieroglyphica); Michel Suignard; 2016-09-20

Summary. Discussions at I&E Cambridge 2016 through to UTC#148 yielded various suggestions for extending the L2/16-018 Proposal, notably considering rare quadrat structures and extending scope to address vertical writing issues along with associated tall quadrat orthography in horizontal writing. At UTC#148 there was consensus on use of the EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH HORIZONTAL JOINER and EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH VERTICAL JOINER proposed controls but that the EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH LIGATURE JOINER should be suspended in favour of investigating more elaborate  schemes. Monograms and other more complex arrangements not well-suited to controls to be treated as part of hieroglyph repertoire development.

October to December

• L2/16-298 Draft additional repertoire for ISO/IEC 10646:2016 (5th ed.) Amendment 1.2 (WG2 N4770); Michel Suignard; 2016-10-27
• L2/16-307 Towards an Expansion of the Unicode Hieroglyph repertoire; Bob Richmond; 2016-10-28
• L2/16-326 Recently Closed Action Items (since 2016-07-25); Rick McGowan; 2016-11-06
• L2/16-342 Recommendations to UTC #149 November 2016 on Script Proposals; Deborah Anderson, et al 2016-11-07.
• L2/16-325 UTC #149 Minutes; Lisa Moore; 2016-11-18

Summary. L2/16-298 draft allocates a block 13430-1343F Egyptian Hieroglyphs Format Controls with two characters defined: U+13430 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH HORIZONTAL JOINER and U+13431 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH VERTICAL JOINER and as things stand these are to be part of the repertoire of Unicode 10.0 (Summer 2017). Other repertoire and writing system issues are still being investigated and I expect activity to continue at 2016 levels during this year.

Bob Richmond

Analysis of Unicode Egyptian hieroglyphs in a collection of MdC-coded transcriptions

This is a follow-up to my post last week MdC analysis for Unicode Repertoire Extensions.

I've applied the web app to a collection of 180 MdC files and summarised the results in Analysis of Unicode Egyptian hieroglyphs in a collection of MdC-coded transcriptions [PDF].

There is also a minor update to the MdC analysis for Repertoire Extensions web app itself fixing a couple of bugs and increasing the number of repertoire candidates to 200.

Bob Richmond

MdC analysis for Unicode Repertoire Extensions

As part of discussions on expanding the hieroglyph repertoire in Unicode it is useful to be able to inspect existing digital documents in Manuel de Codage (MdC) format. I've therefore made a web app available for this purpose: MdC analysis for Repertoire Extensions.

Most users of MdC will probably find the app instructive, whether interested in Unicode developments or not.

MdC methods of encoding Egyptian hieroglyphs have been around for over 25 years. MdC has proved by far the most popular method of digitally encoding hieroglyphic for publishing and database-type applications.

One complication is the fact that MdC was never technically defined in detail and work on the system appears to have stopped after the publication of the second edition of Hieroglyphica (2000) and before documentation was made available online. Therefore, several interpretations, extensions, variations and subsets of MdC are in existence (e.g. WinHiero, JSesh 5.5, WinGlyph and InScribe 2004). The web app attempts to be fairly permissive on what variation of MdC is analysed.

There is something of the chicken and the egg about releasing an app before there is a clear vision of the first expansion of the Unicode hieroglyph set. Bear that in mind.

I hope to evolve and improve the app over the next few months so feel free to send feedback via www.egpz.org.

Bob Richmond

Extending the Hieroglyph repertoire in Unicode

At time of writing, the latest draft proposal about additional Egyptian hieroglyphs is L2/16-079 “Preliminary draft for the encoding of an extended Egyptian Hieroglyphs repertoire” http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16079-hieroglyphs.pdf by Michel Suignard, dated 2016-04-11. This is the latest of several iterations by Suignard, the first of which was a preliminary draft L2/15-240 dated 2015-10-09.

An important part of this proposal is a database containing basic information about each of the encoded hieroglyphs. This database to be maintained on the Unicode website. Over 6000 additional hieroglyphs are proposed in addition to the 1071 hieroglyphs encoded in Unicode already and this basic data should make it reasonably straightforward for software tools, fonts and so forth to work with the expanded repertoire.

There are a number of open issues for discussion in the draft proposal. I hope to write on some of these topics in future blog posts.

One point I’d like to make now: many of the additional hieroglyphs first appear in the Greco-Roman period so it is likely that fonts and tools aimed at classical Egyptian from Old Kingdom to New Kingdom omit or downplay these additions. In fact, for much use of digital hieroglyphic writing systems I suspect popular fonts will contain at most hundreds of additions to the current Unicode standard set rather than thousands. Time will tell.

I’m not personally involved in developing this proposal but agree with the overall aim to enrichen Unicode support for hieroglyphs. I don’t know what the thinking is on timescales for completing the proposal but don't see any reason it can't be finished this year. So it seems to me that if Egyptologists or others have ideas that might help improve what is being proposed, the time to be helpful is to communicate what you have to say during Summer 2016.

Bob Richmond