Homebrew input method

["B. T. Raven" <nihil@nihilo.net>]

I once (in ver 21.3) made a copy of leim/quail/hebrew.el and then 
modified it make a new input method "heblish" (more descriptively it 
would be hebrew-trans). Then I added this to leim-list.el:

(register-input-method
  "heblish" "Hebrew" 'quail-use-package
"א" "Homebrew input method."
  "quail/heblish")

then in heblish.el

(quail-define-package
  "heblish" "Hebrew" "א" t "Homebrew input method.
Based on hebrew.el but transliterated (mostly)rather than conforming to 
Israeli keyboard.
Hebrew letters are assigned to lowercases, some stand-alone diacritics 
to upper case."
  nil t nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil t)

there followed a bunch of key-character pairs (utf-8)like:

(quail-define-rules
  ("+" ?﬩) ;; alt plus
  ("q" ?ק)
  ("q." ?קּ)
  ("Q" ?ֻ) ;; qubuts
  ("w" ?ש)
  ("w." ?שּ)
  ("e" ?ֶ) ;; segol
  ("E" ?ֱ) ;; hataf segol
  ("r" ?ר)
  ("r." ?רּ)
  ("t" ?ט)
  ("t." ?טּ)
  ("y" ?ע)
  ("u" ?ת)
  ("u." ?תּ)
  ("i" ?י)
  ("i." ?יּ)
  ("o" ?ַ) ;; patah
  ("O" ?ֲ) ;; hataf patah
....
and many more

This actually worked after a fashion but of course in left to right 
order. I think I copy-pasted characters from hebrew.el so that they 
would be saved correctly in iso-2022-7bit coding but I don't remember 
the details now. It was more an exercise than a practical necessity.

Questions:
Why are the quail/nnnnn.el files all in that 7bit encoding, even in 
Emacs ver. 23? If I can get leim-list.el and heblish.el looking right in 
an emacs buffer, how do I save them to ensure that the coding is 
correct? Sometimes an encoding error (I think in leim-list.el) causes 
not only Emacs but the entire OS to freeze (mswin2000). Is the correct 
way of registering an additional input method to put it in leim-ext.el?

Thanks,
Ed