Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Writing Ancient Egyptian 2009

In an earlier article I wrote about typing Egyptian Hieroglyphs using non-Unicode systems. Now Unicode version 5.2 includes the Gardiner set of 1071 Hieroglyphs, and you can input them from the Character Palette using the font Aegyptus.

For info relating the Unicode set to the Manual de Codage (MdC) system, see this note.

I wonder if one could make some kind of useful keyboard IM for these using the OS X Custom IM Generator…

(12/1/2009) A reader has posted an experimental MdC IM .cin file here. Others are encouraged to give it a try.

5 comments:

Chris Harvey said...

I've got a question about the OS X Custom IM Generator you mention. I make all my custom keyboards using .keylayout XML files but have found these don't work as effectively as I'd like for syllabic orthographies (namely Cree, Ojibway, Inuktitut...) I haven't spent much time with the .inputmethod or .cin formats but decided to try them out today. I'm making a test .cin for western Cree. My question is, do I have to hit the space bar to make the results appear? I tried installing the .cin Esperanto keyboard layout from openvanilla site, and it looks from the code like if I type in "cx" I should get ĉ, but it looks like I have to type the space bar after every character.

Thank-you
Chris Harvey

Tom Gewecke said...

I don't know the answer. For me the Esperanto example doesn't work right either. I have only worked with the .inputmethod variety and with scripts where I wanted a candidate window to appear. I can't remember if a space was always needed or not.

Magnus Lewan said...

Nice info and nice font!

Does anyone know if there is any program that is able to actually structure the characters correctly? For example the word for crocodile, should be like this, if I understand it well: this . But using just the characters in the font, I get a purely horizontal string: ����������. Is there any easy way around that in any program?

Tom Gewecke said...

MacScribe does this, but it's non-Unicode.

http://www.macscribe.com

Anonymous said...

This is my initial try. Looking forward to feedback from the Egyptological community!

http://github.com/lukhnos/openvanilla-oranje/raw/master/DataTables/egyptian.cin