Thamus

Thamus is a companion application for Theuth, created to ease the font description tables editing process. A stripped down version of it can be directly used online, and as they are very similar the quick instructions here refer to both.

The main screen of Thamus (1) is divided into two panes: the left pane allows you to browse each code of a table and all the entities defined in several tables (2). The right pane is used to edit the currently selected character code description, and browse the Unicode standard (3).

(1) main screen
(2) entities pane	(3) Unicode pane

Codes pane

Once opened or created (from the File menu) a font description table, browse its character codes in the left pane: each character is shown in a row, with hexadecimal and decimal codes and glyph (when available in the display font). The lens button there allows you to filter the characters according to several attributes. The star button is used to add a new character code description. To edit or view a code just click on it.

Entities pane

This pane is used when an entities index is loaded or created (using the Index menu). An entities index is an XML file created by Thamus itself by scanning several font description tables and collecting all the entities names, types and occurrences and is useful when building a new table, so that you can quickly refer to the same entity in another tables.

Editing pane

A character code can be described into 1 'segmental' and 0 or more 'suprasegmental' entities, or just skipped with an optional comment if not required by your text conversions (in this case just click the skip tab and check the corresponding option). The segmental entity name can be typed or selected from the dropdown list (when an index is loaded). Also, you can specify if a description is only approximate or even diverted (this may be useful when your text has abused of a character, for instance using the stigma as final sigma: in this case it's preferable to describe the stigma character code as final sigma so that you will get a correct text after conversion).

Each suprasegmental entity has a name and a value: for instance, the entity DBreath (breathing diacritic) has 2 values, ) (smooth) and ( (rough; many entities names are modelled onto their Beta code equivalents). To add a suprasegmental entity enter them and click the add (plus) button. The other buttons are used to remove the selected entity or all the entities.

Unicode pane

This pane works like Theuth's Unicode task pane. It allows you to browse the most relevant characters of the Unicode standard and quickly find the one you are looking for (this is useful for building Unicode-related description tables).