Overview of Yiddish in Unicode on Windows 2000

What You Need: This is a new version of the Windows operating system which requires a current, powerful PC - a bare minimum of 128 Meg's of RAM and preferably a Pentium 3 processor. If you bought your PC before mid-late 2001, it might not be powerful enough.  Many new PCs (usually classified by vendors as "small business PCs") for sale now do include the Windows 2000 operating system. This is not to be confused with Word 2000,  part of Microsoft's Office 2000 suite of programs which actually run on Windows 98 and probably Windows 95 as well.  Windows ME (an upgrade of Windows 98) is also NOT the same as Windows 2000. Windows 2000 looks, feels, and smells the same as Windows 95 or 98 or ME to the user; but it is technically an upgrade of a different but more stable operating system called Windows NT; it's actually the upgrade from NT-4 but with a user interface that looks and acts more like Windows 95 or 98. Windows 2000 is less prone to frequent crashes than Windows 95/98/ME. For Windows 2000 to do Yiddish, users need to configure their system and install a Yiddish keyboard layout. Click on <www.shoshke.net/uyip/windows_2000_for_yiddish_.htm>   for step by step instructions on how to set up Windows 2000 for typing and reading Yiddish Unicode.

What You Can & Cannot Do: You can both type and read Yiddish in Unicode UTF-8 using a wide range of standard Microsoft products. Several keyboard layout options are available, and it is possible to purchase software with which you can design your own.  There are unconfirmed rumors that Microsoft might someday support a "UYIP" keyboard which users would have to install on their own, but that is uncertain at this time.

How to Do It: We can type and read Yiddish in Unicode UTF-8 using all of Word, Excel, Access, Notepad, Wordpad, MS Outlook, Outlook Express, etc.

Considerations:  Unicode is not yet universally or consistently used; i.e., by all versions of Macs, in a way that is consistent with Windows. Also, we're still working out the tricks of how to make it work. Keep checking these pages for updates.

Back to general discussion of Unicode.

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