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

[Mark-Jan Nederhof]

On Saturday 30 Jul 2016 10:52:00 Marwan Kilani wrote:
> "For example take Dd=f, with cobra + hand + viper. Sometimes you see
> hand:viper clearly entirely
> inside the bounding box of the cobra. Sometimes you see the hand in the
> cobra, while the viper
> is entirely below, with the tail of the viper extending below the tip of
> the tail of the cobra. Sometimes,
> the head of the viper is inside the bounding box of the cobra, while the
> tail of the viper extends
> below the tail of the cobra."
> 
> Sorry, to go back to the same thing, but.. what is the practical need of
> encoding such a distinction?
> 
> having the inside or outside the cobra has (I guess I should say "as far as
> I know") no meaning and no importance whatsoever. There is no linguistic,
> no semantic, nothing..
> 
> it is just a graphical variant, a calligraphic choice of the scribe.
> 
> Unicode should be about standardized transcriptions, not about paleographic
> details. The important thing here is that the "f" comes after "D+d". That's
> all.
> Why should we encode such calligraphic variants in the first place?
> 
> What is the utility of that?

I must have been spectacularly unclear.

If one accepts that an encoding should contain primitives that describe
the approximate spatial arrangement of signs, then it is inevitable there will be 
boundary cases where it is unclear how to encode some text. That holds 
for a system with 20 control characters as well as for a system with 3 control 
characters.

Of course, if one does not accept that an encoding should contain primitives 
that describe the spatial arrangement of signs, then we're back to square 
one. I suggest you reread Stéphane's messages on the subject, who 
motivated time and time again why at least one prominent potential user
community most certainly needs to have access to the graphical realisation 
of a text. Stéphane explained this with extraordinary detail and above all 
patience. I don't see any need to restart this. There are diminishing returns 
for repeating the same discussions ad infinitum.

Mark-Jan