Inkscape

Can I use Unicode to write Egyptian Hieroglyphs? (A Unicode Character code chart exists).

Asked by Paul Papatzacos

I am writing lecture notes for a course in the history of mathematics (University of Stavanger), and am looking for easily accessible ways to type hieroglyphs. There exists a Unicode Character code chart for Egyptian hieroglyphs. Each hieroglyphic character is coded by five digits. Apparently this is not supported by Inkscape (I have version 0.48).

Question: Am I missing something, i.e., is there a way to write Egyptian hieroglyphs in Inkscape?

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Best su_v (suv-lp) said : 		#1

If you know the Unicode character codes for the individual glyphs, and have a font installed which contains those glyphs, it should be doable in Inkscape, via Unicode input method:
<http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/Text-Creating.html#id1174576>

Tested with Inkscape 0.48.2, 0.48.4 and a current development build (r13416) on OS X 10.7.5:

1) using 5-digit Unicode character codes as listed for example here:
 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs#Unicode>
or here:
 <http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U13000.pdf>
and one of these fonts
 <http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/Aegyptus_R.ttf>
 <http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/Gardiner.ttf>
 <https://noto.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/fonts/individual/unhinted/NotoSansEgyptianHieroglyphs-Regular.ttf>

2) If you prefer 4-digit unicode character codes, you could try the fonts linked here:
 <http://mjn.host.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/egyptian/fonts/newgardiner.html>
which have the code points transposed to 0xE000 to 0xE42E.
Tested in Inkscape 0.48.2 and 0.48+devel r13416 with these fonts:
 <http://mjn.host.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/egyptian/fonts/NewGardiner.ttf>
 <http://mjn.host.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/egyptian/fonts/AegyptusSubset.ttf>

Possibly this doesn't work well with stable 0.48.4 on Windows - in this case you might consider testing a recent (unstable!) development snapshot build: <http://inkscape.org/en/download/windows/>

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Paul Papatzacos (paul-papatzacos) said : 		#2

Thanks ~suv, that solved my question.