However, the current Unicode specification does not list a character set or subset designed specifically for Old English and Middle English. Given such ranges of possible characters and character sets one would expect that Old English and Middle English letters are readily available in any Unicode compliant font. While this number is sufficient for coding the characters used in the major languages of the world, the Unicode Standard and ISO/IEC 10646 provide the UTF-16 extension mechanism (called surrogates in the Unicode Standard), which allows for the encoding of as many as 1 million additional characters without any use of escape codes”.
LUCIDA SANS UNICODE ETH CODE
Using this 16-bit encoding “means that code values are available for more than 65,000 characters.
![lucida sans unicode eth lucida sans unicode eth](http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~robh/spgs/sol0305.jpg)
The correct rendering is possible due to the fact that the Old-English-specific letters of the prayer were encoded into their Unicode values so that they could be displayed in a Unicode font in which any character is represented as a special 16-bit long Unicode value. The principle lying behind the correct rendering of Old English (and Middle English) scripts on the web is relatively simple.
![lucida sans unicode eth lucida sans unicode eth](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/10/89/9f/10899f8a85ab0f42788dd8ac2eff0abb.png)
Sȳ ðīn wylla on eorðan swāswā on heofonum.Īnd forʒyf ūs ūre ʒyltas swāswā wē forʒyfað ðāmþe wið ūs āʒyltað.Īnd ne lǣd ðū nā ūs on costnunʒe, ac ālȳs ūs fram ȳfele. Þū ūre fæder, þe eart on heofonum, sȳ þīn nama ʒehālʒod. Users of Unicode compliant browsers and above mentioned operating systems should see the two texts as identical: The Old English text is followed by a check image containing the same text. The following text, an Old English version of Our Father, illustrates the results of using Unicode to include an Old English script in this article. The linguists or literary historians who will make use of the Unicode character sets when writing their web articles can then be fairly sure that the results of their work will be displayed correctly for the majority of the readers of their web pages/articles. Including Old English and Middle English scripts in a web page may not be an easy task to do, but the development of the Unicode character set together with the UTF-8 character encoding may significantly help anyone faced with this task.
![lucida sans unicode eth lucida sans unicode eth](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--LZnGVyLfIs/TwlmSyQeu7I/AAAAAAAACO4/NFL50wUNO78/s1600/Lucida+Sans+Unicode.jpg)
Users of other operating systems are advised to consult the information available on the “ Display Problems?” web page of the Unicode Consortium. The results achieved by the method described in this article are assumed to be displayed correctly on Microsoft Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/XP operating systems in most Unicode compliant web browsers.
LUCIDA SANS UNICODE ETH HOW TO
The purpose of this article is to suggest how to include Old English and Middle English scripts in web pages and to provide a comprehensive glyph-to-code reference table for Old English and Middle English letters.