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Comment by lolc | Hacker News Reader

You can look at the transcribed Linear Elam corpus at https://center-for-decipherment.ch/tool/#script=elam

By enabling phonetic replacement, you can read the text of these old fragments of human writing: https://center-for-decipherment.ch/tool/#script=elam&dir=LTR...

The site grew out of an independent effort to decipher Linear Elam but these days we pretty much track what Desset is publishing. The glyphs are mapped in the Unicode private use range and strings can be copied into text documents as long as you use the provided fonts.

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Thanks for the links. I found it interesting that the site was programmed using Elm; was there any particular reason for this? Also a comment on the fonts. Although I understand it is easier to combine the fonts to include a Latin script, I prefer the Google fonts approach that they only include the specific Unicode slots for a certain script. This make it easier for publications to have consistent typography, although is a hassle to an extend. What program do researchers in the field normally use for papers? I use LuaLaTeX and easy to map macros to print the right glyph.

Regarding Elm: At the time it worked very well for our use case. It still builds fine, but now it doesn't look like Elm is viable long term.

As for the font: The font pack did include an unmerged font with just the glyphs. I'm not clear why that isn't included anymore. But to make it easy to publish, I'd create merged fonts of the desired typefaces, so the editing is smooth. It's just that most font licenses do not allow publishing derivatives.

Why would you want to set up macros when you can just copy the chars into the doc? There are many sign variants and there are no established names for these glyphs. It really helps to just see the sign instead some macro name.

The state of the art for researchers in this field is copying image files for each glyph into their docs. It is that bad. So being able to work with Unicode strings is a huge improvement.

Thanks. Yes copying Unicode strings is a common practice and I use it for some of the scripts I am writing about. I am busy with a write-up that spans almost all known scripts, for some scripts macros work better for me as I can type \LE{180} and get the glyph No. 180 and \LE[2]{180} to get variant 2 etc., and the star version \LE*{..} can do something else.

Ah yes the merged fonts can get unwieldy when you want to use multiple scripts in the same doc.

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