UTF-8 Syriac

With the advent of the UTF-8 Standard, there isn't the need there used to be for Syriac fonts in documents - they are handles by the OS. The unicode code points are in the range U+0700 to U+074F, decimal 1792 - 1871, 2 byte chars. But you have to make sure your OS and your applications are set to use UTF-8.

UTF Syriac on Linux

UTF-8 is standard under all modern Linuxes. To check, in a command window do env | grep -i utf-8 and you should see the LANG and LC_* variables set to things that end in UTF-8. If LANG=C you need to find things.

UTF Syriac on Windows

UTF-8 is not the same as UTF-16. The microsoft world used UTF-16 starting with Windows NT, and mistakenly often referred to it as Unicode - it isn't. UTF-16 also has the misfeature of being byte-order dependent, so it is to be avoided.

On Windows, you may have to enable UTF-8: Control Panel > Clock and Region > Region > Administrative tab > Change system locale button > enable Beta:Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support.

I think Notepad's default encoding is UTF-8. If not, you want to change Notepad's default encoding to UTF-8 to use it on UTF-8 documents. To Change the Default Character Encoding in Notepad:

To set the default encoding in Notepad, you use the Registry Editor. Right-click Start, click Run. Type regedit.exe and click OK. Navigate to the following registry branch: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Notepad
From the Edit menu, click New DWORD (32-bit) value and name it iDefaultEncoding. Double-click iDefaultEncodinga and set the value to 5 (for UTF-8, no BOM). Here is the list of possible value data you can assign:
= ANSI
= UTF-16 LE
= UTF-16 BE
= UTF-8 BOM
= UTF-8

Microsoft Word on Windows

In Windows, you may need to configure Microsoft Word

In Control Panel, click Uninstall a program.
In the list of programs, click the listing for Microsoft Office or Microsoft Word, depending on whether you installed Word as part of Office or as an individual program, and then click Change.
Under Change your installation of Microsoft Office, click Add or Remove Features, and then click Continue.
Under Installation Options, expand Office Shared Features, and then expand International Support.
Select the font set that you need, click the arrow next to your selection, and then select Run from My Computer.

Adding Syriac Characters to a Document

If you are using Word, you should set the document's encoding to UTF-8, using File/Properties. If you are using UTF-8, when you export the document to XHTML you should NOT see old-style Estrangelo font encodings like this: <span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:'Estrangelo (V 1.0)','sans-serif'">0xw4m</span>

You may be able to just cut and paste UTF-8 characters into a UTF-8 Word document. Just cut and paste UTF-8 characters from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syriac_(Unicode_block)

or here: https://www.metadas.com/utf8/syriac/

or type them into the box here and cut-n-paste the result: http://code.cside.com/3rdpage/?charset=utf-8&g=middle_eastern&s=70&e=74

Here's an example from the Syriac characters cut-n-pasted from the above URL (RtoL): ܀܁܂܃܄܅܆܇܈܉܊܋܌܍܎܏ܐܑܒܓܔܕܖܘܙܚܛܜܝܞܟܠܡܢܣܤܥܦܧܨܩܪܫܬܭܮܯܱܴܷܸܹܻܼܾ݂݄݆݈ܰܲܳܵܶܺܽܿ݀݁݃݅݊݋݌ݍݎݏ

If you are set up for UTF-8 this document you are reading Should Just Work(TM).

Transliteration table

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