Could Unicode deliver the level of paleographic detail needed for encoding ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs?

[Peter Constable]

William, it seems to want to reinvent SVG but limited to text elements and without the XML apparatus. While perhaps interesting as a thought experiment, I don’t think you’ll get much interest unless you can provide compelling reasons why yet another format is needed.

(The OpenType COLRv1 table format was designed to supersede the SVG table and had, in my opinion, some pretty compelling reasons.  But there were still some who said it wasn’t needed.)

In any case, what you’re discussing is a higher-level protocol than Unicode. _Unicode_ will not be delivering this any time soon.


Peter

From: Unicode <unicode-bounces at corp.unicode.org> On Behalf Of William_J_G Overington via Unicode
Sent: Wednesday, March 6, 2024 10:34 AM
To: unicode at corp.unicode.org
Subject: Re: Could Unicode deliver the level of paleographic detail needed for encoding ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs?


James Kass wrote as follows:


> Seriously, but also in the department of “nobody asked”, here’s how to rotate glyphs by any angle:


The virtual machine would do all of that processing behind the scenes for each point in the glyph once it received an angle and a Gr command. I note that the formula quoted rotates the mathematical way, namely counterclockwise for a positive theta.


> Of course, the glyph has now likely shifted out of its “boundary box” and will need to be repositioned appropriately.


Possibly. Yet this need not necessarily be a problem because the Gs command could have been used to scale the glyph before the rotation and the Gr command might be defined to rotate about the centre of the bounding box of the glyph, given that the glyph has been validated during fontmaking as having no outlying off-curve points.


William Overington


Wednesday 6 March 2024

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://corp.unicode.org/pipermail/unicode/attachments/20240307/afab3aad/attachment.htm>