MCW encoding of Hebrew (was RE: Response to Everson Ph and why Jun 7? fervor)

[Peter Constable]

> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf > Of E. Keown > Sent: Monday, May 24, 2004 12:38 PM     > Leading computational Hebraists in the late 1980s > tried to persuade Unicode planners to include a > non-public but very widely used academic Biblical > Hebrew code, Michigan-Claremont-Westminster, in > Unicode....They were rebuffed (or, if you will, > perceived themselves to be rebuffed).   I was not involved in those discussions so cannot comment on them. I just wish to point out that the MCW representation of Hebrew most certain *is* supported in Unicode: MCW uses ASCII Latin letters and punctuation characters to stand for Hebrew letters, vowel points and accents, and those exact same ASCII characters are encoded in Unicode. In fact, any existing MCW/ASCII-encoded file of Hebrew text is, in fact, also MCW/Unicode-encoded since the representation of Basic Latin characters at the character encoding form and character encoding scheme levels is exactly the same for ASCII as it is for Unicode:   Hebrew     MCS/ASCII            MCS/Unicode         literal  code unit    literal   UTF-8 ------------------------------------------------ alef       )       0x29          )      0x29 bet        B       0x42          B      0x42 gimel      G       0x47          G      0x47 . . .     To encode any different from this in Unicode to support MCW texts would have been fairly bad news for the people that use it.       Peter   Peter Constable Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technologies Microsoft Windows Division