Is the Demotic script represented in Unicode?

Question

Does Unicode have signs for Demotic script? Is there any font containing such signs?

The Unicode has assigned 1072 characters for Egyptian hieroglyphs and for Hieratic (which is the parent system for Demotic and the cursive version of hieroglyphs) - so I wonder if there is any Unicode support for Demotic too

Answer 1

Although Demotic is still not encoded, there are already texts encoded in rich-text documents (using specific fonts).

They are based on the Coptic script, with a few additions for the diacritical Yodh on some letters; this works with some ligatures and slightly modified letter forms, but this is not purely a "hack" because in fact the Coptic script was developed from Demotic (on its cursive form used in Thebes) with the simplified forms from Greek adapted for the Late Ancient Egyptian language (which was then transcribed in the same period and the same area of Thebes with BOTH the Demotic and Coptic scripts; while the Demotic script also coexisted with Hieratic, i.e. the cursive form of the complex hieroglyphs highly simplified).

You can see this here: https://ucbclassics.dreamhosters.com/djm/demotic.html

This work is the working base for a future encoding of Demotic in Unicode, but many searchers can use this font (and the keyboard input layout, which is based on Classical Greek, with a few modifications) on MacOS, Windows and now as well Linux, within several Office word processors, and now as well on the web (provided the web browsers support Opentype features, and webfonts). It still does not allow plain-text, but this works, using the Coptic encoding (with just a few additional generic diacritics, plain-text is possible and even directly readable by Egyptologists).

So the good question is: will Demotic be encoded separately, or will Unicode just consider to unify it with Coptic with the few additions needed? Unicode already chose to unify Egyptian hieroglyphs with Egyptian Hieratic, but this is quite controversial as Hieratic is very far from hieroglyphs (currently encoded for its monumental form carved on stone that have been used with lots of variants during 2 millenia), and much nearer from Demotic.

So may be Demotic will be encoded separately by Unicode (to avoid breaking the modern Coptic script still used today) but unified with Hieratic (which will be separated from Hieroglyphs). This would create an Unicode "Hieratic-Demotic" script, i.e. "Late Egyptian Cursive" (not to be confused with "Egyptian Cursive Hieroglyphs", which is extremely similar to the older monumental Hieroglyphs, but were developped to be painted on papyrus instead of being carved in monumental stones, so their form is much less angular and a bit simplified by the speed of drawing with a brush, but a lower precision of the brush and diffusion of ink on papyrus). For now it is not decided. But Egyptologists already have their tools to create documents easily and discuss them... using a rich text form.

There are other existing fonts. However msot of them are not free. They initially requires proprietary rich text formats, but this is not logner the case with free office suites like LibreOffice and OpenOffice (which can also process MsOffice formats, all supporting as well the ODF formar instead of the old MS formats). Note that ODF is easily convertible to HTML+CSS: this makes publication on the web possible as well.

Note that for Egyptian Demotic, you need much less characters than for Egyptian Hieroglyphs and Egyptian Hieratic: using the Coptic set (mostly based on Greek) with a few diacritics (much less than those used in Classical Greek!) along with rich-text and specific font designs is still the best choice today.

But the most important problem with borrowing the Coptic script for writing Demotic is the directionality (note that this is also a problem inside the Greek script for writing Ancient Greek...)

Also Unicode still does not support boustrophedon correctly and does not support a suitable model the layout needed for hieroglyphs that are encoded, with the same level that Unicode adapted its model for Hangul squares compositions and for the vertical rendering of sinographic scripts! This will also be a problem for other scripts still to be encoded (e.g. SignWriting, or chemical and mathematical notations, or musical notations; all of them having modern use but requiring specific layouts that are still not representable in plan-text with jut Unicode encoding alone).

So you can't do all you want with just Unicode plain-text, and you need rich-text formats: a solution may be found with HTML+CSS, then supported by OpenType, long before Unicode decides doing something, or just resignates to do nothing before long (because most modern scripts are encoded and there are less companies interested in paying the development of paleographic scripts, and paying their membership to add it and work on it), or there's some new proposals to better encode complex text layouts than just basic directionality (and syllabic square layouts in Hangul, or Arabic-like and Brahmic conjoining layouts, all of them being fully supported by their specific properties) !

Another source you may look at, for a candidate font is http://paleography.atspace.com/ which introduces this set of 279 paleographic fonts for 30 old scripts, available at: https://download.cnet.com/Paleofonts/3000-2190_4-10547504.html or individually at: https://github.com/reclaimed/paleofonts (which is where resides now all the archived fonts). However this huge set only contains one "Demotic" font (in fact for the "Meroitic Demotic" script, not the Egyptian Meroitic, which has partial coverage with just mappings on top of ASCII Latin letters and not the needed diacritics and necessary ligatures). And this legacy font set does not have the quality that we find today: no OpenType features (only TrueType), no or incomplete Unicode mappings, partial coverage, poor metrics, no hinting: they are just small enough to replace fallback fonts that would just display mojibake in Unicode, or for legacy texts translittated to other input scripts.

So many of these paleographic scripts will be developed by community efforts (e.g. within the Noto opensourced project, and with help of Unicode contributors and other opensourcers to work on them and find and discuss the rare ressources used by paleographers). You'll have to be very patient or try to develop you own community of interest with rare linguists spread in universities around the world with very small budgets, which often have poor knowledge of the technical requirements for developing modern fonts.

However there's now a renewal of efforts, because tools to develop fonts are easier and more reliable to use, and just a few persons with good contacts (in various working languages) could seriously help develop this support that many linguists and poor students would appreciate for their work to revive this important human heritage: Egyptian Demotic with its 2600 years of active use and its real importance for many cultures with which it has been in contact, is really a big gap we should fill. Unicode is just waiting for proposals and active experimentations and talks (which should also involve other standard bodies like W3C for CSS Text, and OpenType for font designs, and various OS vendors). Of course, if this development requires encoding additional characters in the UCS for usage of these scripts in plain-text, ISO working groups will be involved too and will need to agree with Unicode (but we know that this can take many years after proposing encoding new scripts or desunifying any existing script).