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I am preliminarily trying to work with creating a couple of indexes with xindy in a XeLaTeX file. One index will be the normal index about names, and I may disturb the list later on. A second list is about transliterated words

As I use ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs transliterated, I need to create an index being ordered in a certain order:

Unicode A722 should be the first letter, then Unicode A357+i as second letter, Unicode A725 as third and so forth (As those signs do not appear in the majority of the normal fonts, I prefer to give the code out of it).

The order is the usual academic order, but it is completely artificial, and not officially supported by any of the languages normally used in XeLaTeX (unless Ancient Egyptian has become a modern language and I did not know about it...).

Is there any information online in order to create a new ordering system for the index, or anyone on the list has any suggestion about a way to proceed?

Roberto Gozzoli
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    You didn’t wrote about that: Did you read the xindy documentation? – Speravir Feb 27 '12 at 22:18
  • @Speravir I have read what comes the LateX Companion, but it could not help that much. I may have to read better what is on the xindy website though – Roberto Gozzoli Feb 27 '12 at 22:25
  • You want to use xindy, so you must have installed it. Part of the installation is the documentation, too. There must be somewhere a manual.html, a style-tutorial.html and a faq.html – maybe, these are also on the website, I didn’t search there for them, now. As a MiKTeX user I never used xindy, but as far as I see you should search for “define-letter-groups”. – Speravir Feb 28 '12 at 02:05
  • In addition: Take a look, how the preshipped modules are defined, especially these for languages with non-latin letters. – Speravir Feb 28 '12 at 02:17
  • Could you please provide more details on sorting you wish to have? I've downloaded UA720, allkeys, U13000 from Unicode.org and I've visited http://hieroglyphs.net. Could you be more specific what you need, if this question is still active? – Malipivo Apr 18 '14 at 05:53
  • I have a better idea now of what's going on, there is an old writing, Faulkner index+Manuel de Codage System (a preview of glyphs) and a complex Gardiner Classification Order (also used among Unicode charts these days as U13000). – Malipivo Apr 18 '14 at 17:38
  • @Malipivo,I have seen your request, I will reply this coming weekend. You have found Faulkner, which is correct. The Manuel you mention still use a pre-Unicode font, so while the signs are correct, some of the letters have to use two different unicode signs to do it. I have not found anything for the new Unicode signs online, so I will do it during this weekend I will post it here. – Roberto Gozzoli May 01 '14 at 02:17
  • @Roberto I did my homework, there are two great fonts in ttf-ancient-fonts package in Linux, or, we can download them from http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/. I've also found hieroglyphs in color, http://www.qsl.net/5b4az/ (Miscellaneous Software->Egyptian Hieroglyphs), I've checked it there are all hieroglyphs from a Unicode set. I am using mapping to get from letter+number form to a glyph. In transliteration we use British spelling or computer letters. I am not done here, but I have a good idea what migh be needed. :-) – Malipivo May 01 '14 at 06:17

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The index processor xindy has some predefined languages but not Egypt. So you have to define your own sorting rules. This can be done in your style file by:

(sort-rule "à" "a")
(sort-rule "á" "a")
(sort-rule "ã" "a")
(sort-rule "è" "e")
(sort-rule "é" "e")
(sort-rule "ç" "c")

Of course this are not the Egypt alphabet ( I don't know this) but it demonstrates the steps. More information about sorting rules are given here:

http://xindy.sourceforge.net/doc/faq-4.html

The predefined language of xindy are listed in texdoc texindy.

Marco Daniel
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