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

[Arthur Rosendahl]

On Thu, Mar 07, 2024 at 06:56:09PM +0000, William_J_G Overington via Unicode wrote:
> What happened was that I was looking throuh the UTC Current Document
> Register and I had a look at the document mentioned in the first post in
> this thread.
>  
> https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2024/24045-ancient-egyptian-rotations.pdf
>    
> I saw the statement in the conclusions "and suggest a level of palaeographic
> detail that Unicode cannot deliver."

  Did you read the rest of the document?  It is very clear that the
author is not suggesting that Unicode should support that level of
palaeographic detail.  Quite the contrary: he argues against the
introduction of additional variation selectors to represent rotations.
That stance is fairly obvious by reading only the paragraph from which
you extracted the quote with which you started this thread.  For the
benefit of the list, the context is

	7 Conclusions

	The use of rotations in Unicode deserves reconsideration.  Some
	of the rotations that have already been added to
	StandardizedVariants.txt undermine common assumptions about
	Unicode and Unicode fonts, one of which is that the validity of
	an encoding does not depend on the choice of font.  New
	rotations that have recently been proposed also have the
	potential to misrepresent what may be mere inaccuracies in
	modern handwritten transcriptions, and suggest a level of
	palaeographic detail that Unicode cannot deliver.

  The author then mitigates this conclusion somewhat in the next
paragraph, but overall the intent is clear: there is no need to
represent arbitrary rotations of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs in
Unicode.


	Arthur