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

[Michael Everson]

Palaeographic reproduction is out of scope for Unicode. The precision needed for that is already available in Illustrator and such. Unicode encoding permits searchable and interchangeable text. A certain normalization is expected, I think. 

I really think we should start out with a robust mechanism for representing text, whether paragraphs of Egyptian text on its own or inline citations within paragraphs in English, German, French, etc. Can we possibly focus on normalized Egyptian in LTR order? 

Earlier I said:

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. 

Comment please. 

Michael