NewGardiner
TrueType font for Egyptian hieroglyphs from
Unicode proposal N3349
Description
This font contains the 1071 glyphs from 0x13000 to 0x1342E,
forming the section from
document WG2/N3349R
that deals with Egyptian Hieroglyphs.
(There is further information about the glyphs.)
The name indicates that the font does not have
the pretence to offer much more than the shapes of the font used by
Gardiner in his grammar and in supplementary documents,
while it is 'new' in the sense of being somewhat more streamlined
and uniform.
The font was explicitly designed for use on a computer screen, and
consequently the lines are thicker than in some other hieroglyphic fonts.
It is also suitable for hieroglyphic text on paper however.
A detailed list of justifications for the design of
individual glyphs, including the choices of their dimensions,
is forthcoming.
The font is available in two versions. In the first, the code points
are as prescribed in Unicode, from 0x13000 to 0x1342E (in the SMP).
In the second, the code points were transposed to 0xE000 to 0xE42E
(in the Private Use Area of BMP).
This was in order to accommodate for legacy software that cannot
handle character codes of more than 2 bytes.
Download
From Version 3.01 (2025-05-19) onward, please download from GitHub instead.
The zip file (approx. 1.0 MB) includes:
- NewGardiner.pdf: PDF file with printed glyphs
- NewGardinerSMP.ttf: TrueType font (SMP)
- NewGardinerBMP.ttf: TrueType font (BMP)
- NewGardiner.txt: Plain-text mapping from Gardiner names to code points in BMP
- OFL.txt: OFL 1.1 license
- OFL-FAQ.txt: OFL FAQ
- FONTLOG.txt: Basic information about font
Versions
-
Version 2.09 (2023-11-16):
- Fixed codepoints of variation selectors.
- Adjusted insertion variant of V009.
- Added two more insertion variants.
- Added ligatures.
- Redrew H008 to have pointy side more clearly at the top.
- Reduced height of M012E, M012F, M012G, M012H to 1 EM.
-
Version 2.08 (2023-06-19):
- Added top half brackets.
- Added insertion variants.
-
Version 2.07 (2023-05-24):
- Added the additional 29 control characters from Unicode 15.
- Added V011D.
- Made cartouche caps narrower, to allow use as independent signs.
- Added parentheses, square brackets, braces, and angle brackets (U+2329 and U+2330).
-
Version 2.06 (2021-01-07):
- Redrew B005A.
- Improved G053.
-
Version 2.05 (2020-11-09):
-
Version 2.04 (2020-07-09):
- Improved A042A to show scepter more clearly.
-
Version 2.03 (2014-05-25):
- Improved R027, R028.
- As work-around for another bug in TextLayout.getBounds()
introduced with Java 1.7, some lines were redrawn in B001, B002, B005 and E003.
-
Version 2.02 (2012-08-08):
- Improved A021, C011, P008, P009.
-
Version 2.01 (2012-05-10):
- As work-around for a bug in TextLayout.getBounds()
in Java on (some versions of) Mac OS X,
which sometimes gives the wrong x-value,
all glyphs are moved to x=0.
-
Version 2.00 (2009-12-30):
- Categories A, B, C completely redesigned to be more uniform.
-
Version 1.01 (2009-01-08):
- Adobe Reader complained about bad widths in font. Now corrected.
-
Version 1.00 (2009-01-07):
FAQ
Can I use this font, and if so how?
See the enclosed OFL 1.1 license.
How do you feel about extending the font with new signs?
I will wait for the Unicode sign list to be extended.
How did you create this font?
Using FontForge.
I load the font in Word and nothing happens. Why?
What did you expect? That English text is magically translated
into Ancient Egyptian? Some additional tool is needed to format
hieroglyphic encoding into an image. See for example
ResToImage and
RES in Latex and
RES in JavaScript and
HieroJax.
Links
- opentypehiero:
Use of NewGardiner with Unicode control characters
- Aegyptus:
Comprehensive and elegant font.
It includes a section compatible with the Unicode proposal.
For convenience, I have rescaled the glyphs of that section, and moved the code points
to match the NewGardiner font in the Private Use Area of BMP:
- JSeshFont: Unicode font in JSesh