Egyptian Hieroglyphs:
I have been bogged down for some time with a difficult and painful knee condition (cartilage de-generation, e.g. osteoarthritis) and had an operation on both knees to try and improve things (it made it more painful for weeks!). However I used this period of reduced mobility to tinker with Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs - I studied this very interesting and pioneering writing system developed by one of the oldest civilizations on earth.

I also wanted to learn and practice the use of the Gimp image editor, so I combined these interests to produce a set of both outline-only and colored hieroglyph images. I started by writing a makeshift software tool to extract all the glyphs from the Aegyptus TTF font file, by using the Freetype TTF library. I then edited the individual hieroglyph outline images in the Gimp, to fix whatever IMHO minor defects (like inconsistent outline thickness, asymmetry etc) that I thought I found in them. I then used the Gimp again to color these outline images, using, as far as possible, either colors from similar images or colors from pictures of the animals and objects depicted, which I found on the Internet.

I have completed the touch-up and coloring of the hieroglyphs in the Gardiner list, which is commonly used for most hieroglyphic text compositions and for learning the grammar of ancient Egyptian, plus approximately 300 additional hieroglyphs as suggested in the NewGardiner font by Mark-Jan Nederhof. I present below a sample of the hieroglyph images I produced (the basic or uniliteral alphabet) and also gzipped packages of all the hieroglyph images, in various formats. All these are provided under the GNU GPLv3 license.

tuxscribe: Hieroglyphic Document Editor for GNU/Linux
Once the hieroglyph images were ready, I started work on a Hieroglyphic Document Editor application I called "tuxscribe". This editor can create, edit and save hieroglyphic documents using any one of the Gardiner sets described above. This means that tuxscribe can produce hieroglyphic documents with normal (regular) outlines, bold outlines or colored images. At this stage, as of the first release version 0.4-beta, tuxscribe is limited in its abilities, since there is no hieroglyphs palette to make composition easier, glyph manipulation is limited to re-sizing and moving within a cadrat, saving of the document is limited to either SVG (.svg) or PNG (.png) format images and there is no support for MdC. I wrote tuxscribe more as a personal aid to learning the hieroglyphic writing system and so its more of a "toy" program, at least at this stage. I may try to develop it later into something more capable but, as I am not as young as I used to be, that is likely to take time. In any case, having brought tuxscribe to a basically useful state, its time to start learning the Egyptian language, to whatever extend its possible for a 67 year old!

This is a screen shot of tuxscribe with a color version of part of the "mankind" document from the Egyptian Texts provided by the JSesh installer on my system. Click on the thumbnail for the full size image.

This is the the saved document, in SVG format, of "mankind" from the Egyptian Texts provided by the JSesh installer on my system. Click on the thumbnail for the full size image.

This is the the saved document, in PNG format, of "mankind" from the Egyptian Texts provided by the JSesh installer on my system. Click on the thumbnail for the full size image.

					Download a tar.bzip2 package of colored Gardiner list hieroglyphs in PNG image file format. (Last edited and uploaded on February 27, 2012)
					Download a tar.bzip2 package of colored Gardiner list hieroglyphs in SVG image file format. (Last edited and uploaded on February 27, 2012)
					Download a tar.bzip2 package of normal outline Gardiner list hieroglyphs in PNG image file format. (Last edited and uploaded on February 27, 2012)
					Download a tar.bzip2 package of normal outline Gardiner list hieroglyphs in SVG image file format. (Last edited and uploaded on February 27, 2012)
					Download a tar.bzip2 package of bold outline Gardiner list hieroglyphs in PNG image file format. (Last edited and uploaded on February 27, 2012)
					Download a tar.bzip2 package of bold outline Gardiner list hieroglyphs in SVG image file format. (Last edited and uploaded on February 27, 2012)