Formatting of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic text

For encoding of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic text, a central issue is the choice of primitives to express how hieroglyphs are positioned relative to one another. Different such primitives have been used for preparing printed documents and for compiling electronic corpora. Recently, nine control characters were introduced in Unicode for formatting of hieroglyphic text. The adequacy of such control characters can be determined by systematically encoding texts from different periods.