Recently in Ancient Scripts Category

What's New in Unicode 5.1?

By ELIZABETH J PYATT on April 23, 2008 3:35 PM |

Unicode version 5.1 was recently released, and includes some new code blocks as well as new specifications. As with all new versions of Unicode there will be a time lag until the new items can be incorporated into fonts and utilities, but here is a partial list of new items

If you're interested in the new characters, the best place to view them is at http://www.unicode.org/charts/

New Plane 0 Scripts

  • Cham (Cambodia/Vietnam)
  • Kayah Li (Thailand/Myanmar)
  • Lepcha (India)
  • Ol Chiki/Santali (India)
  • Rejang (indonesia)
  • Saurashtra (India)
  • Sundanese (Indonesia)
  • Vai (Liberia)

Script Extensions

These blocks add characters to previously encoded scripts.

  • Cyrillic Extended-A
  • Cyrillic Extended-B
  • Arabic - characters for math, 4 Qu'ranic and multiple characters for different languages
  • Indic - Malayalam, Tamil character sequences, Devanagari chandra a,
    Sanskrit sounds in Gurmukhi, Oriya, Telegu
  • Latin - characters for minority languages and capital German sharp S (rare)
  • Math Symbols
  • Medievalist Punctuation - for research
  • Myanmar Additions

New Plane 1 Ancient Scripts and Miscellaneous Symbols

  • Carian (Anatolia/Turkey)
  • Lycian (Anatolia/Turkey)
  • Lydian (Anatolia/Turkey)
  • Phaistos Disk (Crete)
  • Domino Tile Symbols
  • Mahjong Tile Symbols

Some Ancient Script Mega Fonts

By ELIZABETH J PYATT on November 9, 2007 3:29 PM |

If you've achieved total script geekdom, then you especially want fonts which support ancient scripts as well as the modern ones. Unicode has been expanding its ancient script coverage, and fonts have been catching up in the past year or two.

Some of my favorites include:

MPH 2B Damase - available free from Gallery of Unicode Fonts. It includes many scripts including the Aegean scripts, Phoenician, many cuneiform scripts, Glagolitic, and more.

Aegean, Akkadian, Unicode Symbols - These fonts and others are freeware fonts from George Douros. Just pick the ones you want. Note - he has a heiroglyphic font if you need it, but it's not Unicode compliant (Unicode is still working on this script)

Alphabetum Unicode - This font from Juan José Marcos comes highly recommended, but it does cost $15.

Code 2001 - From James Kass. Technically it's still in beta, but that doesn't appear to concern anyone much.

« Accents & Punctuation | Main Index | Archives | Arabic Script »