Hieroglyphica historical fonts
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Hieroglyphica
Egyptian hieroglyphs have fascinated people since the days of ancient Rome¸ when wealthy Romans were perhaps the world's first tourists¸ visiting pyramids and temples that were older then than the Roman Colosseum is in the modern day. Even today¸ over a millennium and a half since the last scribe died¸ they are part of our art¸ our movies¸ our books... and our games.
Whether in pulp and adventure¸ fantasy¸ Lovecraftian horror¸ or even science fiction games¸ hieroglyphs are used all over the gaming realm. Naturally¸ there's a need for a suitable font to produce hieroglyphic text and inscriptions as needed for handouts and art. The existing hieroglyphic fonts¸ however¸ are either geared toward completely popular uses -- "write your name in hieroglyphs" -- or are meant for writing scholarly papers¸ not game adventures. There is no hieroglyphic font for gamers. Or at least there wasn't¸ until now.
T he Hieroglyphica package consists of three fonts: Medu¸ authentic Egyptian hieroglyphs¸ complete with determinatives; unlike any other hieroglyphic font¸ the short characters can be stacked for a proper appearance (the free TextJiggler program can do that for you¸ too)¸ and wrapped in a cartouche simply with italics. Glyphic¸ a readable font that appears at first glance to be hieroglpyhs¸ and is otherwise very much like Medu; and Hieroclipic¸ a collection of all of the more pictorial characters¸ such as scarabs and birds¸ from the other two fonts¸ handy for use as clipart. All of these fonts come in both Normal and Carved forms. As a general rule¸ Carved looks best at 60 point type or better¸ due to the level of detail; Normal looks good at even small sizes. (it was used for the overlay text on the obelisks in DarkCity )
There are a total of 14 files: 8 for Medu (Regular¸ Cartouche¸ Determinative¸ and Determinative Cartouche¸ all in plain and Carved)¸ 4 for Glyphic (Regular and Cartouche¸ Carved Regular and Carved Cartouche)¸ and 2 for Hieroclipic (plain and Carved). That's a lot of hieroglyphic fonts!
In addition¸ there is a PDF manual giving some historical information about the fonts¸ complete instrucions on how to use them¸ and character maps for all three.
Don't forget to pick up TextJiggler ¸ Wintertree's free capitalization tweaking software. It makes setting up properly stacked hieroglyphs as easy as typing in what you want¸ selecting Medu or Glyphic as desired¸ clicking "JIggle"¸ then copying it into your word processor and switching to that font. TextJiggler can do a lot of other things¸ too¸ which are handy¸ but it's invaluable for the hieroglyphic fonts. It makes setting up text like you see below trivially easy. And did I mention free?
If you want to really make it look authentic¸ you can print out your hieroglyphs on papyrus! Historically¸ hieratic would generally have been used for writing on papyrus (which probably means there needs to be a hieratic font) but hieroglyphs look awesome. The image to the right is an excerpt from a full page of hieroglyphic text printed in Medu¸ via an Epson Artisan 835 printer¸ on a sheet of genuine papyrus.
Of course¸ you can always just use papyrus-design paper from the craft store (or Amazon); it would certainly behave better in the average printer! But the picture to the right (and the bigger one on the Wintertree blog) show that it is indeed quite possible to run real papyrus through at least one model of inkjet printer with quite good results.
There are more details in the Discussion section below.
FONT LICENSE INFORMATION: Wintertree fonts are li