HieroEditor

Writing has come a really long way, with various dead languages and writing styles we’re still trying to fully understand today. A suitable example here are the Egyptian hieroglyphic texts. Dedicated to studying and writing with this style, HieroEditor lets you view, and export different writings based on custom input.

On the visual side of things, the main window sports a clean layout, with different panels for easy input of custom text, relative preview, and generated hieroglyphs. The application completely relies on the Manuel de Codage, which is the standard computer encoding format for handling Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Note that the application relies on a somewhat different type of input. You still get to work with text, but every Egyptian symbol is represented by a specific combination of characters, so plain input of text for translation doesn’t actually have an effect.

Luckily, the application comes packed with a glyph explorer. It shows up in a different window, letting you choose a corresponding letter and its group to have all related glyphs displayed. The preview area shows a small thumbnail, inserting code, as well as general details where available, such as name, phoneme, determinant, and ideogram.

You can keep both the main window and the glyph selection panel up for easy input. Although there’s no actual possibility to export generated glyphs as characters, the application does allow you to have a picture saved to file, or sent to clipboard.

Additional options can be used to configure the size of displayed glyphs, with various size specifications at your disposal. Moreover, there’s a built-in flash card game to help you learn the meaning of glyphs.

To sum it up, HieroEditor is a neat application with which you can study, and write using Egyptian hieroglyphic texts. Although it needs a little getting used to for properly writing down glyph code, results are surely worth your while, and you can even learn a thing or through thanks to the flash card game.