Survey: Egyptological Transliteration Fonts
What is the constant in our posts? Maybe we should say “Unicode”! Our first substantial blog was about Unicode. And today, Unicode is still the central point!
What is it all about? Recently, there was a mail on the EEF list announcing the update of a font called Trlit_CG Times. It said:
The new version, also developed by Willem Hovestreydt, now includes a new character. This is “ï” (i + diaeresis / Unicode: U+00EF), which represents the two oblique strokes usually rendered as “y” (Gardiner Z4) and is inserted by pressing capital Y.
Can you guess? This is indeed not a Unicode font! If you type a “Y”, it will store a “Y”, but the font will display it on the interface as if it were an ï. You can easily tell if the font is a Unicode font or if it is just tricking you. Create a transliterated text with the font in question. Then change the font to, let’s say, Arial. If the transliteration characters become normal letters like Y or A, then it is not a Unicode font. Then the font is just pretending to have a transliteration.
This was common practice before Unicode. In the age of Unicode, of course, this practice is not quite as understandable. It has serious drawbacks: The data is font-dependent. If you use a different font, you get something different. If you google for ï, the data you entered with a Y will of course not be found.
Okay, we wanted to dismiss this mail as a curiosity. But then we noticed that Egyptology still relies on such non-Unicode fonts. Here are some examples:
The guidelines for the Proceedings of the International Congress of Egyptologists write:
Use the standard transliteration font Trlit_CG Times for transliterations/transcriptions, and the Coptic_Normal font for Coptic text – the latter two can be downloaded from the Online Egyptological Bibliography website: https://oeb.griffith.ox.ac.uk/fonts.aspx. (https://ice2023.com/cache/guidelines-english-4-october-2023.2079/guidelines-english-4-october-2023.pdf)
Guidelines of the Journal:
All transliterations must be rendered in the Trlit_CG Times font (free to download online) within the text. (https://journals.sagepub.com/author-instructions/EGA)
Guidelines of the Zeitschrift:
If you make use of other transcription fonts than “Transliteration” or “Umschrift”, please submit them in conjunction with the manuscript. (https://www.gkr.uni-leipzig.de/fileadmin/Fakult%C3%A4t_GKR/%C3%84gyptologisches_Institut/Dokumente/Guidelines.pdf)
At least IFAO uses Unicode, see https://www.ifao.egnet.net/publications/publier/outils-ed/polices/. Digital projects (from AED to Wikisource, see our compilation https://oraec.github.io/2023/08/24/leiden-unified-transliteration.html) also use Unicode.
Confusing, isn’t it? That’s why we want to get an overview and have created a survey. We would like to know from you who uses which font. We also want to know what continent you are from and how old you are. There is a prejudice in our group that boomers don’t use Unicode. We would like to disprove that. Okay, let’s go! Here is the survey. We will get back to you with the results!
Link of the survey: https://tripetto.app/run/UO4SQ6UOME
Perhaps, we can embed the survey. If you only see HTML tags, click the link!
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