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

[Bob Richmond]

Hieroglyphic font development, the coding for clusters doesn't bother me at all so long as I have suitable reference docs and data. If a+G043+b means what we all know it means or whether 10 controls come into play. GSUB is good enough for basic fonts but I'm not going to be managing, hand arranging and scaling thousands of clusters and I surely hope others don't either. More elaborate approaches will use GPOS but and interesting layout devices but too technical a topic to bore this general group with. It sure ain't like the ABC world. As you know better than anyone.

I am not arguing against layout features for Egyptology purposes, just saying it’s the tiniest issue when making a hieroglyphic font with shaping.

True we don't need to be total slaves to reading order (the Egyptians weren't) but if methods exist that preserve the regular sequence why be perverse?

Bob


-----Original Message-----
From: Egyptian [mailto:egyptian-bounces at evertype.com] On Behalf Of Michael Everson
Sent: 28 July 2016 14:12
To: Egyptian Hieroglyphs in the UCS <egyptian at evertype.com>
Subject: Re: [Egyptian] On "A system of control characters for Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic text" (2016-07-23)

On 27 Jul 2016, at 19:03, Bob Richmond <bobqq at live.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> I've no problem with some kind of 4 corner system in theory and spent some time over last two weeks trying to come up with a workable version that isn't insanely complicated. Incidentally nobody to date has actually said how they might like it to work so I've been on my own.

Instructions to the font developer: Put an element into one of the four quadrants. The syntax would indicate that the Character A when followed by top-left or bottom-left control will go on the top or bottom left of the next character, Character B. And if Character B is followed by a top-right or bottom-right control then it is the next character, Character C, which will go on the top or bottom right of Character B. 

> Apart from Mark-Jan et al (in http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16210-egyptian-control.pdf)  who propose that a "Cobra with group tucked inside" should be encoded with the group preceding the Cobra. For the common and simple example 'Dd' (Cobra containing hand) he proposes the 'd' hieroglyph comes before the 'D' in the code sequence. I'm actually quite shocked that several experienced Egyptologists want to do this.

The Cobra can be dealt with in one of two ways:

Hand + bottom-left + Cobra

or

Cobra + vertical-stack + Hand

The decision here is *conventional* and *arbitrary*. Either option will work. Both options should not be allowed. Egyptologists just decide whether to consider the cobra as a diagonal character like the Chick, or a horizontal character which just happens to have a tail. It doesn’t matter which, so long as ONE choice is made. That choice will be explained in the Unicode Technical Report which will eventually be one of the instruments which can provide font developers information on Egyptian. 

Michael
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