From bobqq at live.co.uk Mon Mar 13 12:56:57 2017 From: bobqq at live.co.uk (Bob Richmond) Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2017 12:56:57 +0000 Subject: [Egyptian] Variation selectors for Hieroglyphs Message-ID: Hi All For comment. Two years ago when starting the current round of enhancements to hieroglyphic in Unicode, one option was to expand the range of available hieroglyphs using variation selectors. I didn?t suggest this at the time in the hope that progress would be quicker than has transpired and we could avoid the method. Variation selectors are a feature of Unicode. The 16 characters in variation selector block U+FE00..U+FE0F have names VS1 to VS16. Basically a variation selector is placed after a standard character to specify a glyph variant for a character. The file http://www.unicode.org/Public/UCD/latest/ucd/StandardizedVariants.txt gives the current standardized variants in Unicode. If applied to Hieroglyphic, an example would be to define the two character sequence P008 VS1 to be a horizontal oar (noted by Gardiner EG p499). Unicode do not intend this to be some general purpose system so any such usage is meant to be documented in the StandardizedVariants.txt file. However it seems in practical terms current font rendering software does not enforce this rule which means if we make additions to StandardizedVariants.txt there is no need to wait for software updates before we can use the variants (this is a major benefit as additions to the repertoire usually need software updates). Unicode states that adding variation sequences does not preclude addition of dedicated characters at a later stage. In http://hieroglyphseverywhere.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/mdc-analysis-for-unicode-repertoire.html I featured the most common hieroglyphs missing from Unicode for classical transcriptions and a significant proportion of these could be addressed by variation sequences. It would be easy to produce a short proposal to UTC to include those that people would find useful for inclusion in the StandardizedVariants.txt update for Unicode 11 (2017). I have supporting data for this already. Personally I?d find this useful for my chromatic dictionary and other applications but would like to hear what other people think before drafting a list. Bob -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bobqq at live.co.uk Mon Mar 27 18:03:32 2017 From: bobqq at live.co.uk (Bob Richmond) Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2017 17:03:32 +0000 Subject: [Egyptian] Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) documents about Egyptian Hieroglyphic (March 2017) Message-ID: Hi all, I posted an update on documents in the UTC document registry this year to date on http://hieroglyphseverywhere.blogspot.co.uk/. The next UTC meetings are early May. Work has been going on relating to controls and I hope we?ll have more to discuss here on the topic next month. Bob -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: