The Playful Antiquarian

Not quite as easy as ABC

September 26th, 2003

Having spent the past few days dealing with formatting nightmares, involving Japanese and Devanagari scripts, I really appreciated this story about the work of typographer Michael Everson’s work on Unicode 4.0. Most people do not have to worry about the encoding of various scripts, but for those of us who work with Asian languages, encoding can be a huge headache. As Everson says very eloquently when interviewed for this article:

“Imagine how you would feel if your name was Fran�ois, but there was no � available . . . You would be irritated that your phone bill came addressed spelling your name wrong. Now imagine if your language used a totally different alphabet and you couldn’t use computers at all because of it. It’s a question of human rights, really.”

Even if these issues do not affect you, read this article. Everson’s work and background alone are interesting enough reading. Plus, it is nice to see a typographer featured in a New York Times article.

Entry Filed under: Articles, Book People