Gly2Mdc v.2.0: Lessons Learned from Building a Tool for Hieroglyphic Texts

In order to advance digital methods in Egyptology, machine-readable hieroglyphic texts are needed. While machine-readable cuneiform texts have been extensively employed in Assyriological studies, the intricate nature of hieroglyphic script poses challenges in creating accessible corpora. Specific hieroglyphic text editors are used to produce pictures of the texts with signs placed correctly above and next to each other in kind of boxes. The pictures are used in publications, but the machine-readable project files are generally discarded. In this paper, I introduce Gly2Mdc v.2.0, a tool designed to transform the .gly files containing encoded hieroglyphic texts into a more human-readable format. The tool extracts and cleans the encoding and offers users options for saving the text in different formats. The aim is to give the users of hieroglyphic text editors a chance to publish the text also in machine-readable format and increase the amount of text available for building digital methods. Challenges faced in developing this tool are discussed, including the impossibility of achieving a faithful rendition of the original text in machine-readable form and the challenges of converting encoding to Unicode.