[OS X TeX] Egyptian hieroglyphs and Babylonian cuneiform fonts

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 12 août 08 à 18:08, Peter Dyballa a écrit :

> There is an alternative: XeTeX. Many ancient scripts are supported  
> by Unicode and so they are by XeTeX. Exception: Egyptian hieroglyphs  
> and old Egyptian handwriting. There is no range yet reserved for  
> these.

The XeTeX mailing list is home to a number of users of TeX in the  
humanities, for example medievalists, resorting to very specialized  
and idiosyncratic fonts. Also, owing to the cross-platform nature of  
XeTeX, the XeTeX mailing list tends to have a wider-ranging audience  
that the OS X TeX list, with Windows and Linux hackers expert at  
configuring fonts.

Hence, I'd be surprised if you wouldn't meet there somebody able to  
help.

Also, you might be interested in the communication "Creating cuneiform  
fonts with METATYPE1 and FontForge" recently presented at the latest  
TUG conference <http://www.river-valley.tv/conferences/tug2008/>. From  
the abstract:

> The cuneiform font collection covers the Basic Latin (ASCII) block  
> and glyph subsets for Akkadian, Ugaritic and Old Persian with  
> current total number about 600 cuneiform signs. An extension for  
> other languages is planned (Neo–Babylonian, Hittite, etc.). All  
> cuneiform sign forms visually correspond to uniform "Neo–Assyrian"  
> shapes.
>
> [...]
>
> Unfortunately, the glyph repertoire does not correspond to Unicode  
> because more than 300 glyphs do not have their Unicode numbers, and,  
> on the other hand, my fonts covers only about 20% of the Unicode  
> Sumerian–Akkadian cuneiform range (cuneiform signs and numeric  
> signs). The paper describes cuneiform design and a process of font  
> development.

Bruno Voisin