Unicode Hieroglyphs in web browsers: generic web pages

In an ideal world, Egyptian hieroglyphs in Unicode will simply appear as such to the reader when they are used on a website page. The general reader should not have to do anything special such as install a font or configure the web browser in order to display Unicode text.

Egyptian-aware web pages may render text as images (as mentioned in various earlier posts, e.g. on WikiHiero) or use web-fonts to provide a full text experience. These techniques generally work well with reasonably up to date web browsers on all kinds of devices.

However, this post is concerned with generic web pages meaning web pages without any special coding for Egyptian hieroglyphs. These pages rely on the web browser and/or its underlying operating system to render correctly.

Probably the best known example of a generic web page is the Google search page www.google.com. This blog post itself is also such a web page, hosted on www.blogspot.com so if all is well with the browser and device on which you are reading you should see hieroglyphs at the end of this sentence - 𓇳𓄟𓋴𓋴.

Then if you copy then paste these four hieroglyphs into Google search, you see something like this:

I've highlighted the hieroglyphs in red boxes. Search is just one example. If you want to write hieroglyphs in web forums or read hieroglyphs as text on an arbitrary web page chances are you are reliant on generic hieroglyph support from your web-browser.

Modern versions of macOS/iOS from Apple and Windows 10 from Microsoft are Egyptian hieroglyphic ready 'out of the box' and so are their supplied web browsers (Safari, Edge or Internet Explorer) . So is a correctly configured Linux distro. Generic web pages just work for users of hundreds of millions of these modern devices.

If this works for you, great. The browser or system you are using is Unicode hieroglyphic ready and you are done with this post unless you are curious about technicalities.

However the global picture is not yet entirely rosy. Android, by far the most popular system for mobile phones and tablets, is not yet up to speed. Old versions of iOS/macOS and Windows are not hieroglyph ready. When you try the Google search on these kinds of system you likely see box characters where hieroglyphs are expected unless something has been added to these systems to avoid problems.

Why hieroglyphs work (or don't)

Technically for a web browser to render hieroglyphic text on a generic web page all it needs to do is:

1. Recognise the text characters are hieroglyphs.
2. Use a font with hieroglyphs to render the characters.

The Google search illustration above is from Windows 10 using Internet Explorer 11. Everything works as expected because Windows 10 comes with the Segoe UI Historic font (which contains Unicode hieroglyphs). Internet Explorer recognises hieroglyph characters and, in the absence of any more specific font specifications on the web page, uses the Segoe font as default. The Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox browsers also work correctly.

However, even on Windows 10, the Chrome browser (version 59 and earlier) is not hieroglyph ready. It does not detect hieroglyphs on a web page and choose an available font. Chrome 59 serves as an illustration of how things can go wrong when a browser has bugs in font handling.

The latest release of Android (6.01) has an additional problem in that Android comes with a very limited number of fonts installed. Hieroglyphic is not and this is just one of a large number of writing systems that therefore don't render in Chrome, the standard Android web browser, because no font is available or automatically downloaded when required. In theory a Android device could work when the device maker supplies an enhanced version of  Android. In practice I've never seen this happen. Presumably we'll see a working version of Chrome from Google eventually. Meanwhile Chrome should be fine for most Egyptian-aware web-pages.

Getting hieroglyphs to work for generic web pages

With the huge range of devices and browsers available nowadays it is impossible to give detailed information about what may or may not be done to address problems if your setup is not hieroglyph ready.

In many cases the simplest solution is to update your system setup if possible and/or ensure your web browser version is kept up to date.The technical world has moved a long way since 2009 when hieroglyphs were introduced to the Unicode standard but initially unsupported in the then latest systems such as Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx), Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and Windows 7.

Updating is easy for most Linux distros, Apple now provides macOS/iOS updates free of charge and likewise Microsoft provides updates from Windows 7/8 to Windows 10 (strangely, this is currently stated to be free of charge for only a limited time until late July 2016).

If updating is impossible, it seems the Firefox browser works correctly on Linux and Windows devices I've tried so long as it finds a Unicode hieroglyphic font installed. This may work for you. In particular if you are stuck with an old PC setup with Windows 7 it should be sufficient to install a Unicode hieroglyphic font then use Firefox for generic web-browsing instead of Internet Explorer or Chrome. Other less well known browsers may also work.


Bob Richmond