Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Future Plans

It's been a while since I've last posted as I've been just ridiculously swamped. So instead of talking about something really interesting, I'll talk about what interesting things I'd like to do on Ancient Scripts. Aside from creating new pages for scripts, I'm planning some new higher-level content:
  • Bibliography on each page. Right now all my references are jammed into a single page. I would like each page to display its source material, as I actually get quite a few number of requests for that.
  • More interactive pages. I'm working on an Alphabet comparison chart. It's sort of based on the South Asian script comparison widget but a bit more complicated because alphabets are far more diverse than South Asian abugidas. One letter in one alphabet could correspond to two letters in another alphabet.
  • Page(s) on decipherment. This will walk through how the decipherment of a writing system actually happens. And why some scripts can't be deciphered yet.
  • Unicode. A lot of ancient scripts are being included in the Unicode standard, which means if there's a font for it, you can see it on your computer/smart phone/tablet screen. It'd be cool to display which scripts have Unicode and assemble a more comprehensive list of fonts.
  • Glossary. Certain keywords like "logogram" or "boustrophedon" will be active when the mouse pointer is over them and display a brief explanation
Script-wise right now I'm working on Lao, but for some reason I can't get it to work on my ancient version of Photoshop. So I'm using GIMP instead which is just different enough that it drives me bonkers. But do expect that coming soon.

I also uploaded a revised Aztec page the past weekend. I added the syllabary and new examples of glyphs including pure logograms, rebus, and phonetic signs. The link is http://www.ancientscripts.com/aztec.html

Lastly I have a lot of suggestions and corrections to make. Keep those emails coming!