RE: Andrew C. West 魏安 1960–2025

[Doug Ewell]

António MARTINS-Tuválkin replied to Michael Everson:

> I am a daily user of both BabelPad and BabelMap and have countless
> times thanked and praised Andrew in my inner voice.

Haven’t we all.

After many years of constant delight in these two applications of Andrew’s, and having been honored to contribute my SCSU encoding and decoding code to BabelPad, I finally sent Andrew some wholly inadequate sum a few years back as a contribution for his work. I wish I had been able to send much more.

I never met Andrew in person, but we communicated online frequently regarding his apps and fonts, and a few other topics such as the Middle Mongolian calendar. He was always supremely helpful and appreciative of any suggestions thrown his way. I can only imagine the loss felt by those who really knew him, let alone his family.

I worked on C++ and MFC “yonks ago” (borrowed from Stephen Farrell on the IETF list), and I have offered to at least take a look at the Babel* source code to see if I can contribute to its ongoing maintenance. (In the meantime, Unicode 17.0 beta versions exist at https://www.babelstone.co.uk/Software/Beta.html .)

Andrew never got a Bulldog Award, but I would expect to see him here shortly:
https://www.unicode.org/consortium/memoriam.html

安息吧，魏安，

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Doug Ewell, CC, ALB | Lakewood, CO, US | ewellic.org