West's first works concerned
Chinese novels of the
Ming and
Qing dynasties. His study of
Romance of the Three Kingdoms used a new approach to analyse the relationship among the various versions, extrapolating the original text of that novel. West compiled a catalogue for the Chinese-language library of the English
missionary Robert Morrison containing 893 books representing in total some 10,000string-bound fascicules. His subsequent work was in the
minority languages of China, especially
Khitan,
Manchu, and
Mongolian. He proposed an encoding scheme for the
'Phags-pa script, which was subsequently included in
Unicode version 5.0. West also worked to encode gaming symbols and phonetic characters to the UCS, and worked on encodings for
Tangut and
Jurchen.
Software West was the developer of a number of software products and fonts for
Microsoft Windows, including BabelPad and BabelMap. BabelPad is a Unicode text editor with various tools for entering characters and performing text conversions such as
normalization and
Unicode casing. BabelPad also supports a wide range of encodings, and has input methods for entering Chinese,
Mongolian,
Manchu,
Tibetan,
Uyghur and
Yi text, as well as for entering individual Unicode characters by their hexadecimal code point value. BabelMap is a Unicode character map application that supports all Unicode blocks and characters, and includes various utilities such as
pinyin and
radical lookup tools for entering
Chinese characters. ==Death==