Egyptian Hieroglyphs:
I have been bogged down for some time with a difficult and painful knee condition (cartilage degeneration, e.g. osteoarthritis) and had an operation on both knees to try and improve things (it made it more painful for weeks!). However I used this period of reduced mobility to tinker with Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs - I studied this very interesting and pioneering writing system developed by one of the oldest civilizations on earth.

I also wanted to learn and practice the use of the Gimp image editor, so I combined these interests to produce a set of both outline-only and colored hieroglyph images. I started by writing a makeshift software tool to extract all the glyphs from the Aegyptus TTF font file, by using the Freetype TTF library. I then edited the individual hieroglyph outline images in the Gimp, to fix whatever IMHO minor defects (like inconsistent outline thickness, asymmetry etc) that I thought I found in them. I then used the Gimp again to color these outline images, using, as far as possible, either colors from similar images or colors from pictures of the animals and objects depicted, which I found on the Internet.

At this time I have completed the touch-up and coloring of the hieroglyphs in the Gardiner list, which is commonly used for most hieroglyphic text compositions and for learning the grammar of ancient Egyptian, plus approximately 300 additional hieroglyphs as suggested in the NewGardiner font by Mark-Jan Nederhof. I present below a sample of the hieroglyph images I produced (the basic or uniliteral alphabet) and also gzipped packages of all the hieroglyph images, in various formats. All these are provided under the GNU GPL3 license.

	Download a tar.bzip2 package of colored Gardiner list hieroglyphs in PNG image file format. (Last edited and uploaded on June 19, 2010)
	Download a tar.bzip2 package of colored Gardiner list hieroglyphs in SVG image file format. (Last edited and uploaded on June 19, 2010)
	Download a tar.bzip2 package of normal outline Gardiner list hieroglyphs in PNG image file format. (Last edited and uploaded on June 19, 2010)
	Download a tar.bzip2 package of normal outline Gardiner list hieroglyphs in SVG image file format. (Last edited and uploaded on June 19, 2010)
	Download a tar.bzip2 package of bold outline Gardiner list hieroglyphs in PNG image file format. (Last edited and uploaded on June 19, 2010)
	Download a tar.bzip2 package of bold outline Gardiner list hieroglyphs in SVG image file format. (Last edited and uploaded on June 19, 2010)

Please note that the colors I used in many of the hieroglyphs may not be correct because I could only find little information on the Internet on the colors of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Where I could identify the object depicted, I either found a picture of it on the Internet and picked the colors from there (this I did for most of the animals) or I used my best guess. But still there are hieroglyphs that I color at random as I just had no idea what else to do. If you have a good idea what the right color is for badly colored hieroglyphs, please let me know. My email is at the bottom of the home page.

Thank you.