[Egyptian] UMdC - A Unicode Coding Manual for Egyptian?

[Bob Richmond]

Hi All

1071 Hieroglyphs have been available in Unicode since version 5.2 (2009). Six formatting characters are now in the pipeline (since May). Eventually there will be more hieroglyphs and likely control characters too.

The idea of defining a data file format “UMdC” acknowledging Unicode was discussed at I&E 2006 and afterwards but the lack of Unicode availability in the standard and issues of application and system support made this seem a little premature. It seems to me the time is now ripe to revisit the topic.

The basics of UMdC (as I see it) are as follows:


  1.  A well defined file type “umdc” containing plain text and markup (capable of being edited in simple text editors such as Windows Notepad and HTML textarea blocks).
  2.  Guidance on subset usage in database records.
  3.  Basic plain text including the 1071 + 6 for Egyptian characters (plus e.g. transliteration formats).
  4.  Markup to deal with elements missing from Unicode such as hieroglyphs not in the 1071 set.
  5.  Optional markup to help with preparing data for use with other formats such as HTML/CSS and Office applications.
  6.  Optional markup to help with interoperability with MdC88 based data formats (including extensions such as JSesh).
  7.  Specification of font requirements needed for representation of UMdC data.

So long as the markup system is sufficiently flexible (e.g. use of XML-like tags) version 1 of UMdC need not be overly featured and then additions can be made as need is proven. It should be possible to create a version 1 specification supported with basic tools  in months not years.

I expect I’m not the only person who has already done related work. Has anyone any points to make of what they would like to see in UMdC? Anyone like to get involved in defining the markup scheme?

Thanks
Bob Richmond

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