Re: Ancient Egyptian Cartouches

From: Timothy Partridge (timpart@perdix.demon.co.uk)
Date: Thu Oct 28 1999 - 14:25:18 EDT


In message <199910281142.EAA03574@unicode.org> you recently said:

> Michael Everson wrote on 1999-10-28 11:02 UTC:
> > Ar 15:46 -0700 1999-10-27, scríobh Timothy Partridge:
> >
> > >Ancient Egyptian poses several similar problems as I'm sure you're aware.
> >
> > I proposed beginning and ending cartouches like (parentheses), not a single
> > overlay like the keycap symbol.
>
> Makes sense.
>
> Ancient Egyptian cartouches seem equivanent to Latin stylistic forms
> such as
>
> - underlining
> - bold printing
> - crossing out
> - italics printing
>
> which can all conveniently be implemented by a font switch (even though
> special rendering support for underlining and crossing out is common) or
> related markup.
>
> Encoding cartouche start and end might allow conveniently to switch from
> say the "Egyptian Normal 5.5 mm" font to the "Egyptian Cartouched 5.5
> mm" font for the text between the two cartouche ends, which would allow
> the convenient representation of emperor names without requiring any
> modifications in applications (which is probably highly advisable for
> very rarely used scripts such as hieroglyphs).

If the cartouched font would have lines above and below, I'm not sure it
would work. Multiple glyphs are often arranged within a unit square,
especially the spelling ones that are used for names.

I would implement using a carefully chosen double over and under line that
matched up with the end caps.

I notice that in The World's Writing Systems (Daniels & Bright) p 80. the
cartouche is listed with a host of generic determatives. It could be
considered to be a single character that goes around others, like some
Indian vowels. The problem of course is that it is not obvious how many
characters it goes around.

> ______
> |(Markus)
> ------

Is that a request for a plain text way of doing cartouches Markus?

  Tim
  

-- 
Tim Partridge. Any opinions expressed are mine only and not those of my employer



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