[Egyptian] On "A system of control characters for Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic text" (2016-07-23)

[Mark-Jan Nederhof]

Apropos, the reason none of the two versions of our proposal gave much consideration to reading
order is because the signals we were receiving from the UTC, even before we produced the first
version, seemed to go into the direction of giving precedence to graphical order. For example in:

Recommendations to UTC #147 May 2016 on Script Proposals
http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16156-script-recs.pdf

we find:

"
For complex writing systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphs or Japanese, the visual order of
characters should be separate from phonetic order. In complex writing systems, combining
visual and phonetic order can result in visual ambiguity, where one reading could have two
different visual sequences. One could, however, keep a separate field (or use mark-up) with the
phonetic reading, which could be carried along with the data.
"

I interpret this to say reading ('phonetic') order is secondary to graphical order what
Unicode is concerned. But it also suggests there might be room for taking reading order 
into account, and not just in mark-up but also into the Unicode encoding itself. I can't be
certain my interpretation of this is correct. We should ask the UTC for clarification next
week.

Mark-Jan