Blog

featured image for adding hieroglyphs to google docs and slides

How to add hieroglyphs to Google Docs and Slides

Unlike many other scripts and languages, adding ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs to your document is not always a straightforward task.

As well as there being a limited choice of good fonts available, hieroglyphs have the added difficulty of being a non-linear script. In other words, the ancient Egyptian’s habit of creating nice, neat, space-saving groups of hieroglyphs makes modern typesetting much more tricky than if you were typing, say, ancient Greek, or Latin, or even Coptic.

Read More »
4 May 2020 1 Comment
featured image for the google noto hieroglyphs blog post

Google Noto: a font collection with hieroglyphs

In a quest to try to harmonise the ever-disparate collection of technologies that we use to connect on the internet, Google have developed what may be the most comprehensive collection of typefaces yet. Under the umbrella name of Google Noto, the aim of the collection is to include every unicode symbol ever (for free).

They say:

Read More »
28 November 2016 1 Comment

Flowering reed or reed leaf? A hieroglyphic puzzle

As part of some research I was doing, I needed to find a picture of the plant represented in the j hieroglyph (see right), otherwise known as the ‘yod’ or ‘yode’ (M27 in Gardiner’s sign list). Unfortunately, I hit a snag. Some of my language books, such as Gardiner himself, describe it as a ‘flowering reed’. Other books, such as Collier and Manley in their How to read Egyptian Hieroglyphs and James P Allen in his Middle Egyptian tome refer to it as a ‘reed leaf’.

So, what was I to look up?

Read More »
19 June 2014 1 Comment

Egyptian transliteration: will it survive the digital era, or will it be replaced by Manuel de Codage?

This is a question which has popped into my head recently, possibly as a result of the problems I had with transliteration fonts on one of my typesetting projects.

With the ever-increasing presence of digital media such as ebooks and the Internet, and with the inevitable growth of older publications being digitised, the ability to properly render transliteration and other specialist fonts will become more of an issue in Egyptology.

Read More »
10 March 2014 6 Comments

From the typesetter’s perspective: JD Ray, ‘Demotic Ostraca and Other Inscriptions from the Sacred Animal Necropolis, North Saqqara’

Hot off the presses, the Egypt Exploration Society’s latest publication – JD Ray’s Demotic Ostraca and Other Inscriptions from the Sacred Animal Necropolis at North Saqqara – is also my most recent typesetting project. It’s the fourth book I’ve set for the Society, and the first from their Texts from Excavations series (the previous three I’ve done are Excavation Memoirs).

It’s also the first language book I’ve set, so I was really quite excited when the job came through.

The book was a really interesting project for me to put together – both the content itself, and from a typesetting point-of-view. So, I thought I’d share my experience here.

Read More »
1 February 2014 2 Comments