Michael Everson

Michael Everson (born January 1963) is an American and Irish linguist, script encoder, typesetter, type designer and publisher.

[1] Everson is active in supporting minority-language communities, especially in the fields of character encoding standardization and internationalization.

In 2004, Everson was appointed convenor of ISO TC46/WG3 (Conversion of Written Languages), which is responsible for transliteration standards.

[8] Everson has been actively involved in the encoding of many scripts[9] in the Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 standards, including Avestan, Balinese, Bamum, Bassa Vah, Batak, Braille, Brāhmī, Buginese, Buhid, Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, Carian, Cham, Cherokee, Coptic, Cuneiform, Cypriot, Deseret, Duployan, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Elbasan, Ethiopic, Georgian, Glagolitic, Gothic, Hanunóo, Imperial Aramaic, Inscriptional Pahlavi, Inscriptional Parthian, Javanese, Kayah Li, Khmer, Lepcha, Limbu, Linear A, Linear B, Lycian, Lydian, Mandaic, Manichaean, Meitei Mayek, Mongolian, Myanmar, Nabataean, New Tai Lue, N'Ko, Ogham, Ol Chiki, Old Hungarian, Old Italic, Old North Arabian, Old Persian, Old South Arabian, Old Turkic, Osmanya, Palmyrene, Phaistos Disc, Phoenician, Rejang, Runic, Samaritan, Saurashtra, Shavian, Sinhala, Sundanese, Tagalog, Tagbanwa, Tai Le, Tai Tham, Thaana, Tibetan, Ugaritic, Vai, and Yi, as well as many characters belonging to the Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Arabic scripts.

Everson, along with Doug Ewell, Rebecca Bettencourt, Ricardo Bánffy, Eduardo Marín Silva, Elias Mårtenson, Mark Shoulson, Shawn Steele, and Rebecca Turner, is a contributor to the Terminals Working Group researching obscure characters found in legacy character sets used by home computers (or "microcomputers"), terminals, and other legacy devices made from the mid-1970s until the mid-1980s; thanks to their proposal L2/19-025, 212 graphic characters for compatibility with MSX, Commodore 64, and other microcomputers of the era, as well as Teletext, were encoded in the Symbols for Legacy Computing block,[15] while 731 additional characters from L2/21-235 have been accepted for a future version of the standard.

In 2003 he was commissioned by the United Nations Development Programme to prepare a report[19] on the computer locale requirements for the major languages of Afghanistan (Pashto, Dari, and Uzbek), co-authored by Roozbeh Pournader, which was endorsed by the Ministry of Communications of the Afghan Transitional Islamic Administration.

[20] More recently, UNESCO's Initiative B@bel[21] funded Everson's work to encode the N'Ko and Balinese scripts.

[25] Everson has a particular interest in Gaelic typeface design, and does a considerable amount of work typesetting books in Irish for publication by Evertype.