A transcript of an email of Saturday 6 August 2016 relating to the contemporary discussions about control codes for Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics, together with links for the two attachments that were sent with the email, namely a PDF document and a TTF font.
Control codes for Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics
Hi
Earlier today I sent this email and the attachments to some of the people who I know are interested in control codes for Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics. I have now thought that you might be interested to have them so I am writing to you as well.
I enjoyed listening and participating in the two Ad Hoc meetings on Thursday and Friday.
I have been experimenting and I have produced some designs and included them in a font and tested the font by producing a PDF document.
There are sixteen characters. They are located in the plane 0 Private Use Area for testing.
I have designed the glyphs based on three of the control characters in
http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16210-egyptian-control.pdf
yet taking on board ideas from the Ad Hoc meetings.
The EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH HORIZONTAL becomes four separate characters U+E011 .. U+E014 so that each level of nesting has its own character with its own distinctive visible glyph. For example, U+E012 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH HORIZONTAL TWO OPEN
The EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH VERTICAL becomes four separate characters U+E021 .. U+E024 so that each level of nesting has its own character with its own distinctive visible glyph. For example, U+E023 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH VERTICAL THREE OPEN
The EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH END becomes eight separate characters U+E031 .. U+E034 and U+E041 .. U+E044 so that each OPEN character has its own corresponding CLOSE character with its own distinctive visible glyph. For example, U+E031 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH HORIZONTAL ONE CLOSE and for example, U+E044 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH VERTICAL FOUR CLOSE
Please note that the CLOSE glyphs are designed as they are so that there would be no possibility of confusion of meaning if these designs are used with a right to left script in some future document.
Please note that the level two characters are specifically not used in the third example in the PDF document.
I am not an Egyptologist.
My thinking on the structure is from my experience, years ago, of writing scientific computer programs using the Pascal programming language.
When writing a program with various loops of software within loops of software and sequences of loops of software, I sometimes ended up with many rows of text in a printout from a line printer each containing just the word end followed by a semicolon. This was difficult to follow at times, so I used to add a comment, within the software program, after each end; so that I could easily and quickly identify the loop of which each end; statement was a part.
So when I look at the three uses of EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH END in example d of Table 2 in http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16210-egyptian-control.pdf I feel that it would be helpful if each of those three glyphs had a comment explaining of which loop it is the corresponding end. The middle example in the attached PDF is a similar structure to example d of Table 2 yet each glyph of the three CLOSE characters is different from the glyph of each of the other two CLOSE characters. I am thinking that more complicated examples might benefit from having different glyphs for the various levels of nesting and for closing the various mini-sequences.
As I say, I am not an Egyptologist yet I put forward this email and the PDF and the TTF font in the hope that they might perhaps be of interest.
Comments are welcome.
Best regards
William Overington
Saturday 6 August 2016