The Canaanite (Phoenician) letters have been accepted for encoding in Unicode 5.0 in 2006. This was one of the major steps achieved for Phoenician letters in the digital world. What this means is that now you can type Phoenician letters in your documents, on the internet, on your excel sheets, etc., and other people can read it.  You can design Typefaces and the applications are equal to the application of any other font out there on the internet.  The Proposal was submitted by Michael Everson and four pre-Unicode fonts were submitted with the proposal as part of the application:

1- Sidon Font by Michael Everson
2- Eshmoon Font by Salim Khalaf
3- Phoenician Moabite Font by David Rosenbaum
4- Phtem Font by Maroun Kassab (Myself)

The Phoenician encoding went through a debate whether it should be simply a typeface under the Hebrew font or a separate font by itself. If it would be a typeface under Hebrew, it would mean that you would see the Phoenician letters as Hebrew, and you will need to install a specific font on your computer to be able to render it correctly.   This proposal was turned down, and the Phoenician font was allocated a permanent location in the Unicode set.

Currently, you can use a Unicode 5.0 compatible font to be able to see the Phoenician font typed in the table above.

Important Note: Currently, you will not be able to see the characters in the table above if you are using Internet Explorer 6.0 or 7.0. Microsoft browser does not yet support the surrogates for complex types such as Phoenician. Their software is not yet up to date. Even though you would expect from an established company to have thought of eveyrthing, they still did not. In other browsers, such as Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc..., you can see the encoding properly after you install the font. I have contacted Microsoft already regarding this matter, and hopefully they will fix this glitch in their system. It's a browser battle out there, and hopefully it will bring in good benefit for all. I will update this entry once this happens.

To download a Unicode compatible font in .ttf format click here

To Download the zip file click here, unzip, and download on your computer.

To install this font on your computer, copy and paste it into your C:\Windows\Fonts directory.

This page is the test page for Unicode Support for Phoenician in Web Browsers by Alan Wood.

To make it easier on everybody, I have developed a virtual Phoenician Keyboard for your use. Please note that if you need to use this keyboard on your website, let me know. You will need to keep the credit for the developer (which is me), and the link to the website. To be able to use the keyboard, download and install the font above, and use a Unicode compatible browser such as Firefox. Internet Explorer will not work as I mentioned before.

This is the link to the virtual keyboard here:

http://www.canaanite.org/keyboard/

To be able to implement these characters in your webpage design, you must set your encoding to Unicode (UTF-8) so that your design would render correctly. After you set up your encoding, you should be able to type in, copy and paste these characters as you want.