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Working with hieroglyphs on a Mac—resources for Egyptologists
Why?
For an Egyptologist, it's not always easy if
you don't use MS Windows. For typesetting hieroglyphs, everyone of your
colleagues probably uses WinGlyph—but that's of course not an
option for Macintosh users. Therefore, I've made a (certainly not
complete) list of Macintosh compatible applications which can be useful
for Egyptological work. Please note that I am not involved in any of
these applications, so I might not be able to help you if you have some
troubles.
Many of the applications mentioned here have
not yet been tested by me, because I can’t buy and test every
application, so these are not guaranteed to work… But I’ll try to test every free application.
What?
The applications are divided in the following categories:
- Hieroglyphic typesetting:
solutions for typesetting hieroglyphs, ranging from web-based forms to
simple TrueType fonts and complex typesetting environments.
- Hieroglyphic databases:
applications for viewing and editing hieroglyphic texts and/or
transliterations/translations. These are not primarily intended for
printing or integration in other documents (e.g. articles or books),
therefore see the previous category. The database applications are
mostly used for easily exchanging hieroglyphic
texts/transliterations/translations for translating purposes.
- Other hieroglyphic applications:
some other applications for working with hieroglyphs that do not fit in
the first two categories, but are also worth to mention.
- Typesetting Arabic and Coptic:
you might encounter these languages too during Egyptological work, but
here are also a couple of solutions available, some are very easy to
use, others not but are extremely powerful.
- Other useful Egyptological applications: some other applications which can be useful for Egyptological work.
The different applications are all shortly
described: their capacities, their strong and weak points (in my
opinion of course) and their price (freeware, shareware or commercial).
I’ve also given them a rating from 1 to 5 stars: this is of
course very subjective, so don’t blame me for having another
opinion about a particular application… If I haven’t
tested the application, the rating is based upon the specifications I
read and is placed between parentheses.
For further information you'd better visit
the website of the application's developers. For some applications,
I've included detailed installation instructions, because their
installation is not explained on the developer's website or because I
seem to be the first who has successfully run the application on Mac OS
X ;-) Most applications mentioned here only work on Mac OS X—OS 9
or previous support is only sometimes available. Note that I use
‘OS 9’ for every version of Mac OS prior to X. Sometimes
these application will also be available for OS 8.6 or even 6.0.7.
I hope this website will be very helpful for
you. If you have any further questions or comments about the
installation or this web page, don’t hesitate to contact me.
Filip Vervloesem
Student Egyptology at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium)
Last updates:
This are the last updates on this website:
- 23-02-2007: ok, this really should be the last update: the
installation instructions for HieroTeX didn't quite seem to work on Mac
OS X 10.4 if you've installed LaTeX using TeXShop/TeXLive, but now they
should work!
- 24-11-06: this is the last update for this website
(but it will stay online), because I'm now using Linux as my primary
operating system instead of Mac OS X. (If you happen to use Linux too,
check out my new website about Linux-compatible applications for egyptologists, it's coming soon...).
I've never tested any of the applications listed here on the new Intel
Macs, nor will I test them with Mac OS X releases newer than Tiger
(10.4). If you encounter any problems while installing any application
listed here, I cannot guarantee that I can help you (although I can try)... Anyway, these are the
changes with this update: updated manual installation instructions for HieroTeX (installation is different for OS X 10.4!) and for the Copte LaTeX-package.
- 30-08-05: added section Egyptianized Latin Fonts, some minor improvements on the installation instructions for TkSesh.
- 25-05-05: corrected some minor errors in the installation instructions for HieroTex
for better compatibility with non-Fink Tex-installations, although it's
not working (yet) as it should with TeXLive (people reported me they
still have problems with the PostScript-fonts)…
- 02-05-05: added compiled version of res2image 0.2.3.
- 24-03-05: added detailed installation instructions for ArabTex.
- 08-03-05: updated installer for HieroTex,
with the possibility to copy all diagnostic messages of the
installation process, better documentation and support for another type
of Latex-installation: TeXShop/TeXLive-teTeX (in addition to
tetex/Fink).
- 03-03-05: new version of the HieroTex-installer, which solves many errors (in fact, I believe this is the first version that just *works* – at least I hope so :-))
©2006 F. Vervloesem.
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