[OS X TeX] Re: Egyptian hieroglyphs and Babylonian cuneiform

[John B. Thoo]

On Mon, 11 Aug 2008 14:18:44 -0700 I wrote:

> I'm writing some notes on ancient Egyptian and Babylonian
> numeral systems, and I would like to be able to typeset them.


First, my thanks to Thomas Rike, Peter Dyballa, and Bruno Voisin for  
their responses in MacOSX-TeX Digest, Vol 10, Issue 12.

Rike wrote:

> To use "hieroglf" just include
> \usepackage{hieroglf} in the preamble
>
> [...]
>
> \cartouche{\textpmhg{John}}
>
> [...]

That works great.  I didn't know I had hieroglf.  Now I can easily  
typeset the numerals for 1, 10, 100, ..., 1000000, which are all the  
Egyptian that I need for my notes.

Now, on CTAN is fonts/cun (Date 2007-09-15) for cuneiform, but I  
don't see a fonts/cun in my installation.  Is that because I have TeX  
Live 2007 and not TeX Live 2008?  Would installing TeX Live 2008 give  
me fonts/cun that, perhaps, would be just as easy to use as the  
hieroglf?  Or can I simply download fonts/cun from CTAN and use them  
"out of the box" like hieroglf?

Dyballa wrote:

> google for the general concept of font installation. It is
> described in the Font Installation Guide (texdoc
> fontinstallationguide) or, hopefully, still here: http://
> homepage.mac.com/bkerstetter/tex/fonttutorial-current.html.

The first line on that Web page reads, "This tutorial assumes that  
you have installed Gerben Wierda's distribution of teTEX and TEX Live  
for OS X, through i-Installer, and a front end to this distribution  
(like TEXShop, iTEXMac, OzTEX, CMacTEX or TEX Tools)."  I'm using TeX  
Live from tug.org and do my typesetting in an XTerm window, so can I  
still try to follow the instructions on this Web page?

Voisin wrote:

> 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.

I will keep this in mind.  However, at this time I would rather not  
have to become familiar with XeTeX (whatever that is, because I'm not  
very good at using what I currently have as it is) if I can get  
around it.

Thanks again, all.

---John.
(who receives the *digest* version of this list)