Talk:kꜣ

The hieroglyph for noun 3 (bound bull) is not displaying. Something wrong with the Gardiner notation? —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 08:25, 2 December 2012 (UTC)
 * It hasn't been implemented in wikihiero (which seems to be a dead project at this stage), presumably because it is a fairly rare character. I've run into a couple of these instances. I suppose what I should do (in this and similar cases) is insert a jpeg of the hieroglyph myself. I expect I won't anytime soon, though, as I'd have to make the jpegs, and my graphical skills are less than stellar. Furius (talk) 09:04, 2 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Two suggestions: search for a pre-existing free copyright image of it. It very well may exist. Wikimedia Commons has thousands of graphics of rare characters in writing systems that Unicode doesn't support very well (from rongorongo to Phaistos disc to those ubercomplex Chinese characters used only for ceremonial purposes). That failing you, I would recommend taking a high-res photo of it if you can't draw it. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 15:32, 2 December 2012 (UTC)
 * , any thoughts on unsupported hieroglyphs? (Also, the first def could use a quote.) —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 06:34, 23 March 2018 (UTC)
 * They’re a constant thorn in my side, but unfortunately there’s few easy and satisfying options in sight for properly dealing with them. No one is actively working on WikiHiero anymore, so its set of glyphs has been fixed for years. We generally can’t use separate glyph images alongside WikiHiero images because WikiHiero forces them onto a new line.
 * There are sources available for greatly expanding the glyph repertoire of WikiHiero, if someone with the necessary technical skills were willing. The Abydos font, whose license is simply ‘free for any use’, has nine times as many glyphs as WikiHiero currently does. If they could automatically be extracted and converted into images, they could replace the current WikiHiero images and cover practically all the missing glyphs.
 * Alternatively, this site has a custom version of WikiHiero with about twice as many glyphs as the standard one, covering a decent portion of the missing ones. If the developer would be willing to give it a license usable by MediaWiki, perhaps it (or just its images) could be used.
 * Unfortunately I really don’t know anything about working on the technical side of MediaWiki, so I wouldn’t know how to even suggest changing the current installation of WikiHiero. In lieu of such a change, I’m not sure what can be done to solve or circumvent this problem; having ugly Hieroglyphica codes show up instead of the missing glyphs is the best I’ve come up with.
 * I’ve added a quote! — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 08:05, 23 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the quote. As for the issue at hand... even if WikiHiero forces a new line, a case like this where the glyph would be on its own would still benefit from an image. When other, supported glyphs are present, we could use images for all of them. I'll give more thought on how we could improve WikiHiero; it involves getting help from the devs, which is unfortunately not always forthcoming. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 18:39, 23 March 2018 (UTC)
 * You’re right; I’ve added an image here. Another potential issue with using custom images is that, if WikiHiero does come to support more glyphs or is replaced with a new system, the glyphs rendered with custom images will be left behind, so to speak. Do you think it’d be a good idea to create a maintenance category to contain all the pages with non-WikiHiero-rendered glyphs? Thanks! — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 20:47, 23 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I feel relatively certain that no changes will occur to WikiHiero unless we instigate them, so I wouldn't worry about that. As for a category, if/when a change happens, we can easily modify to categorise it; until then, I'm not sure there's a point. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 21:35, 23 March 2018 (UTC)