Cuneify

Cuneify is a facility for generating Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform in Unicode encoding. For simple instructions on embedding Cuneify into a web page, see here.

Implementation

The underlying implementation of Cuneify is presently built-in to the ATF processor. The processor can decorate its output tree with the Unicode character for each grapheme, and this output can then be post-processed in various ways.

Interfaces

At present, the only public interface is via the CGI script at:

http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/cgi-bin/cuneify

CGI API

Parameters

The CGI API takes two parameters:

input: The transliteration to convert which must be in valid ATF format
project: An optional argument naming an Oracc project located on the same Oracc server as the CGI script. The path /cuneify/index.html is appended to the project name to locate the form to return.

Return

When the CGI script is executed, it looks for the project's Cuneify form and, if found, it performs variable substitutions and returns the form as follows:

The <input> element whose name attribute is input is edited so that its value attribute is the user's input transliteration.
The <span> element whose id attribute is CuneifyOutput is edited to insert the result string after the > character.

No XML/HTML parsing is done on the file, which results in the following constraints:

The <input> element which is to be edited must be the first element in the line with an attribute named value.
The <span> element which is to be edited must be empty, but must not be expressed using the XML empty tag syntax (i.e., it must be <span id="CuneifyOutput" class="some classes"></span>). The closing > must be on the same line as the span element. If you are generating the form using an XML processing chain you can subvert any tendency for it to output <span id="CuneifyOutput"/> by including a space character--the space will be included at the end of the cuneiform return string but this should be benign.

Errors

If the input is not valid ATF the CGI script returns an apology for its inability to understand the input.

Example

For an example of how to use the Cuneify CGI interface, see the Cuneiform Revealed [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao/knpp/cuneiformrevealed/cuneify] pages for which the CGI interface was originally developed.

18 Dec 2019

Steve Tinney

Steve Tinney, 'Cuneify', Oracc: The Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus, Oracc, 2019 [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/tools/cuneify/]