RE: FPDAM5: Egyptian hieroglyphs (was Re: Marks)

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sun Sep 30 2007 - 07:32:55 CST

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    Serge Rosmorduc [mailto:rosmord@iut.univ-paris8.fr] wrote:
    > If we take the current standard for encoding hieroglyphs, the Manuel de
    > Codage (which is not perfect), this would mean we would require unicode
    > aware softwares to recognise things like embedded groups, with
    > corresponding scaling algorithms, etc...

    No. Not they would remain optional if the relations (before, above...) were
    encoded as format controls: Unicode can give them ignorable properties,
    their rendering is not absolutely required, but at least they can be used
    for semantic distinction purpose.

    If a renderer is unable to produce the intended layout, they could still
    substitute them with a reasonable glyph (like the MdC ASCII punctuations).

    Even the modifiers (mirroring, rotations, ...), it would be possible to
    encode them as combining characters (that may have an optional diacritic
    glyph rendered after the hieroglyph if they are not supported by the
    renderer, despite these will cause much less problem for existing text
    renderers as they imply no complex scaling or positioning, but only basic
    substitution (the problem is much simpler here than with Indic scripts used
    today that require complex splitting, reordering and contextual substitution
    and positioning rules, notably for Tibetan where this is a very complex
    problem to implement properly).



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