L2/02-307 Lisa Moore Chair, Unicode Technical Committee The Unicode Consortium P.O. Box 391476 Mountain View, CA 94039-1476 U.S.A. Fax 001-650-693-3010 Dear Ms Moore, Unicode and Egyptian hieroglyphs I have heard a little on the internet about developing plans to incorporate Egyptian hieroglyphs into Unicode. I have known of these projects for many years now and was very pleased to hear that they are proceeding further. The set of Egyptian hieroglyphs recognized as the "Garinder set" does not include all possible hieroglyphs, and some people have used that fact to argue against having hieroglpyhs in Unicode. This seems to me to be muddle-headed: when type first appeared in the 15th century, there were similar objections. Ideally some space would be left for additional characters, but whether this is done or not, to achieve a standard encoding of the core material that is used by most people would be very valuable. If in a post-Unicode stage an altogether larger number of characters can be encoded, that would be excellent, but that is not the current state of affairs. I believe that incorporating hieroglyphs in Unicode will be a very valuable step forward and will place the hieroglyphic script on an equal footing with many others. I therefore hope very much that a final scheme for doing this can be adopted and that the necessary funding can be found. With best wishes Yours sincerely [faxed from my computer and not signed August 20, 2002] John Baines Professor of Egyptology john.baines@oriental-institute.oxford.ac.uk