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.

• 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

Hieroglyph has not yet been published. The medium-term plan is to build Hieroglyph with Fury and to publish it as a source build on Vent. This will enable ordinary users to write and build software which depends on Hieroglyph.

Subsequently, Hieroglyph will also be made available as a binary in the Maven Central repository. This will enable users of other build tools to use it.

For the overeager, curious and impatient, see building.

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 textMetrics.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 textMetrics package.

Hieroglyph is classified as fledgling. For reference, Soundness 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, can still be used, as long as caution is taken to avoid a mismatch between the project's stability level and the required stability and maintainability of your own project.

Hieroglyph is designed to be small. Its entire source code currently consists of 319 lines of code.

Hieroglyph will ultimately be built by Fury, when it is published. In the meantime, two possibilities are offered, however they are acknowledged to be fragile, inadequately tested, and unsuitable for anything more than experimentation. They are provided only for the necessity of providing some answer to the question, "how can I try Hieroglyph?".

1. Copy the sources into your own project

   Read the fury file in the repository root to understand Hieroglyph's build structure, dependencies and source location; the file format should be short and quite intuitive. Copy the sources into a source directory in your own project, then repeat (recursively) for each of the dependencies.

   The sources are compiled against the latest nightly release of Scala 3. There should be no problem to compile the project together with all of its dependencies in a single compilation.

2. Build with Wrath

   Wrath is a bootstrapping script for building Hieroglyph and other projects in the absence of a fully-featured build tool. It is designed to read the fury file in the project directory, and produce a collection of JAR files which can be added to a classpath, by compiling the project and all of its dependencies, including the Scala compiler itself.

   Download the latest version of wrath, make it executable, and add it to your path, for example by copying it to /usr/local/bin/.

   Clone this repository inside an empty directory, so that the build can safely make clones of repositories it depends on as peers of hieroglyph. Run wrath -F in the repository root. This will download and compile the latest version of Scala, as well as all of Hieroglyph's dependencies.

   If the build was successful, the compiled JAR files can be found in the .wrath/dist directory.

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.

Hieroglyph was designed and developed by Jon Pretty, and commercial support and training on all aspects of Scala 3 is available from Propensive OÜ.

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, Soundness 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.

The logo is a stylised rendering of the Unicode logo.

Hieroglyph is copyright © 2024 Jon Pretty & Propensive OÜ, and is made available under the Apache 2.0 License.