Hieroglyph

Tools for working with characters in Scala

Hieroglyph provides facilities for working with characters, in particular, by providing typesafe support for different character encodings, and utilizing additional Unicode metadata.

Features

specification of character encodings
warnings issued if using an encoding which may not be available
provides additional character metadata from the Unicode database
facilitates accurate text width calculations, particularly for East Asian scripts

Availability

Hieroglyph has not yet been published as a binary.

Getting Started

Character Display Width

Hieroglyph provides an extension method, displayWidth, on Char which will return the amount of space the glyph for that character will take up, when rendered in a mono-spaced font.

Unsurprisingly, this will usually be 1, but many characters in alphabets that are not based on the Latin Alphabet will need two normal character widths of space when rendered.

For example, compare,

'x'.displayWidth   // returns 1
'好'.displayWidth  // returns 2

However, calculating the width of a character (and, in particular a string of characters) will be much slower if every character must be checked individually, and totalled, when the length field of a string can provide the same value in constant (and fast) time, for strings which are known not to contain any "wide" characters.

Gossamer provides a corresponding displayWidth extension method on all text-like types, which calculates the display width of the entire string by summing its character widths, or, with textWidthCalculation.uniform in scope, simply returns the length value.

Therefore, methods which need to perform text width calculations can use either a uniform mode or an eastAsianScripts mode, depending on the contextual value imported from the textWidthCalculation package.

Status

Hieroglyph is classified as fledgling. For reference, Scala One projects are categorized into one of the following five stability levels:

embryonic: for experimental or demonstrative purposes only, without any guarantees of longevity
fledgling: of proven utility, seeking contributions, but liable to significant redesigns
maturescent: major design decisions broady settled, seeking probatory adoption and refinement
dependable: production-ready, subject to controlled ongoing maintenance and enhancement; tagged as version 1.0.0 or later
adamantine: proven, reliable and production-ready, with no further breaking changes ever anticipated

Projects at any stability level, even embryonic projects, are still ready to be used, but caution should be taken if there is a mismatch between the project's stability level and the importance of your own project.

Hieroglyph is designed to be small. Its entire source code currently consists of 303 lines of code.

Building

Hieroglyph can be built on Linux or Mac OS with Fury, however the approach to building is currently in a state of flux, and is likely to change.

Contributing

Contributors to Hieroglyph are welcome and encouraged. New contributors may like to look for issues marked beginner.

We suggest that all contributors read the Contributing Guide to make the process of contributing to Hieroglyph easier.

Please do not contact project maintainers privately with questions unless there is a good reason to keep them private. While it can be tempting to repsond to such questions, private answers cannot be shared with a wider audience, and it can result in duplication of effort.

Author

Hieroglyph was designed and developed by Jon Pretty, and commercial support and training is available from Propensive OÜ.

Name

Hieroglyphics are elaborate characters, whose meaning requires interpretation, while Hieroglyph is a library which provides encodings to translate between characters and their binary representations.

In general, Scala One project names are always chosen with some rationale, however it is usually frivolous. Each name is chosen for more for its uniqueness and intrigue than its concision or catchiness, and there is no bias towards names with positive or "nice" meanings—since many of the libraries perform some quite unpleasant tasks.

Names should be English words, though many are obscure or archaic, and it should be noted how willingly English adopts foreign words. Names are generally of Greek or Latin origin, and have often arrived in English via a romance language.

propensive/hieroglyph