Michael Everson

As of March 2014 Everson operates a publishing company, Evertype, through which he has published total of 295 books, these include a wide range of titles by various authors and editors, with Everson himself as co-author of one, editor of several, and having adapted or revised several more. He also designed fonts for several.

On July 1, 2012, Everson was appointed to the Volapük Academy by the Cifal, Brian R. Bishop, for his work in Volapük publishing.

In 2007 he co-authored a proposal for a new standard written form of Cornish, called Kernowek Standard. Following the publication of the Standard Written Form in 2008, Everson and a group of other users examined the specification and implemented a set of modifications to it, publishing a formal specification in 2012.

His central area of expertise is with writing systems of the world, specifically in the representation of these systems in formats for computer and digital media. In 2003 Rick McGowan said he was "probably the world's leading expert in the computer encoding of scripts" for his work to add a wide variety of scripts and characters to the Universal Character Set. Since 1993, he has written over two hundred proposals which have added thousands of characters to ISO/IEC 10646 and the Unicode standard; as of 2003, he was credited as the leading contributor of Unicode proposals.

Everson has also created locale and language information for many languages, from support for the Irish language and the other Celtic languages to the minority Languages of Finland. In 2000, together with Trond Trosterud, he co-authored Software localization into Nynorsk Norwegian, a report commissioned by the Norwegian Language Council. In 2003 he was commissioned by the United Nations Development Programme to prepare a report 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. More recently, UNESCO's Initiative B@bel funded Everson's work to encode the N'Ko and Balinese scripts.

In 1995 he designed the Unicode font, Everson Mono, a monospaced typeface with more than 4,800 characters. This font was the third Unicode-encoded font to contain a large number of characters from many character blocks, after Lucida Sans Unicode and Unihan font (both 1993). In 2007 he was commissioned by the International Association of Coptic Studies to create a standard free Unicode 5.1 font for Coptic, Antinoou, using the Sahidic style.

In 1989, a former professor, Dr. Marija Gimbutas, asked him to read a paper on Basque mythology at an Indo-Europeanist Conference held in Ireland; shortly thereafter he moved to Dublin, where he studied as a Fulbright Scholar in the Faculty of Celtic Studies, University College Dublin (1991). He became a naturalized Irish citizen in 2000, although he retains American citizenship.

Everson was born in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and moved to Tucson, Arizona, at the age of 12. His interest in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien led him to study Old English and then other Germanic languages. He read German, Spanish, and French for his B.A. at the University of Arizona (1985), and the History of Religions and Indo-European linguistics for his M.A. at the University of California, Los Angeles (1988).

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; their latest effort, proposal L2/19-025, includes 214 graphic characters for compatibility with MSX, Commodore 64, and other microcomputers of the era, as well as Teletext.

Michael Everson (born January 9, 1963) is an American and Irish linguist, script encoder, typesetter, font designer, and publisher. He runs a publishing company called Evertype, through which he has published over a hundred books since 2006.

Among proposals that have not yet been approved for encoding: N1866 (an early proposal for encoding Blissymbols into the Supplementary Multilingual Plane of Unicode; still listed in the SMP roadmap as of Unicode 11.0 although no further action had been taken on it for years) and N4784R (heterodox chess symbols for use in variant games like fairy chess).