Egyptian Hieroglyphs

A digital outline font of Egyptian Hieroglyphs

Backstory 

I was working on my graduate thesis at Stanford in the newly created major of Digital Typography. The major was established by Charles Bigelow and Donald Knuth – with the goal to explore the production of digital typography. Donald Kunth had invented a program to describe digital fonts called Metafont. For my thesis project, I chose to tackle the design of Egyptian Hieroglyphs with Metafont.

At some point, I discovered that the concept of Metafont – that fonts could be described as a combination of a path and a nib – did not work with the hieroglyphs. There were too many exceptions.

Slowing down the reality of graduation, I started working at Adobe systems where they were also inventing digital typography, developing PostScript. The technology to create fonts with PostScript was still very crude but it was possible to digitize enlarged and cleaned up shapes to produce PostScript outlines. I had experience digitizing fonts a few years prior when I interned in Germany using IKARUS software.

To go forward with the hieroglyphs I decided to use PostScript instead of Metafont.

I needed a good source for the design of Hieroglyphs. Typically Hieroglyphs were written by hand for publications, but there were a few sets of metal fonts in existence for typesetting. Of the three major fonts – German, French and British, I liked the British font best. It was produced at Oxford from the drawings of the deGaries Davies — A wife and husband team who spent time studying and translating the hieroglyphs at Luxor. They produced a set of drawings to be cut into metal slugs for typesetting. I had a printed example of that font – the Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary produced by Alan Gardiner.

I wrote to Oxford asking permission to use their designs to create a set of outline digital fonts as an academic project. They wrote back to say they were already digitizing a set of bitmaps. They weren’t working on a scalable outline font. It wasn’t an outright, no, it wasn’t even the same project – my advisor Charles Bigelow suggested I just press on.

What could go wrong? 

Permission was not clear.

The character set was over 1000 characters. Each character needed to be scanned, enlarged, redrawn to clean up the distortions. I wasn’t graduating any time soon.

There were no keyboard arrangements, so that had to be invented.

With PostScript, each character could be infinitely scaled. How detailed should these characters be?

A digital font still needed an accompanying set of bitmaps (back in the day) an insane and daunting task – something only a bug collector would consider.

Strategy to avoid what could go wrong

To avoid any issues with ownership, I decided I would never sell them. I would give them away to scholars only.

I decided on a level of detail, focused on making the line widths even across all the glyphs.

I organized the characters as Alan Gardiner had classified by attribute – Man and his occupations, Woman and her occupations, Deities, Animals, Buildings, etc. I treated each category as a separate font. The characters were laid out on the keyboard in keys that were accessible to normal text editors.

What went right?

I spent hours redrawing the characters from enlargements to make sure the final digital results were consistent in approach and weight.

Dexter Sear, an unsuspecting yet enthusiastic entomologist was enlisted to do the bitmap fonts – possibly as hard a job as the outline font.

To avoid accepting money, I asked scholars who used the font to send me a copy of the work they created in exchange. I amassed an amazing collection of books on hieroglyphs.

I wrote up my project and submitted it as my thesis allowing me to graduate.

Thesis: Egyptian Hieroglyphs for Modern Printing Devices (pdf)

Press

Publish Magazine
MacWeek
Stanford Campus Report

And the years that followed?

The font was loved and used by lots of Egyptian scholars.

Oxford finally realized the high-resolution version of their font existed and without their permission. They engaged a lawyer to draft up a cease and desist letter. It was sent to the address on record which was Dexter’s. Dexter alerted me.

I felt the best solution was to write Oxford, never mentioning the letter I technically never got. I told them that I had completed the outline font (not the same as their bitmaps), had only offered it to the occasional academic and, would they like it – to keep? I enclosed the font.

John Baines, head of the Egyptology Department was immediately onboard and we had grand plans to make it an official Oxford font. There’s more in this plot including a lot of dropped balls on my side of the court – maybe someday.

Notes to self 

Finish, no matter what. Just keep digitizing – 1100 isn’t all that many. Graduating four years later in a two-year program is better than not graduating.

Get out of a lawsuit by doing the least expected thing – extreme generosity.