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Encodings of Greek

This English version of my German page is provided for convenience of those who do not speak German. I apologize for my poor English.

This document describes some of the most important possibilities of how accented Greek text can be digitally encoded on computers and to what extent they are supported by greekconverter.

1. Unicode
2. Betacode
3. ASCII
4. HTML entities
5. BibleWorks
6. SPIonic, SGreek
7. GreekKeys
8. Character names
9. Others

Unicode

Coding with 16-bit characters, on its way to a widely accepted standard. The canonical representation of letters with diacritics is a sequence of the letter followed by its diacritics. In many cases (as in Greek) a lot of possible combinations of characters and diacritics exist as precomposed characters, too (for compatibility with other systems and for convenience of font creation, I suppose). The stacking order for Greek diacritics is: breathing - accent - iota subscript resp. diaeresis - accent. Look, for example, at the dative singular of the feminine article:

	Canonical: 03C4 - 03B7 - 0342 - 0345
	Partially precomposed: 03C4 - 1FC6 - 0345
	Partially precomposed, another possibility: 03C4 - 1FC3 - 0342
	Fully precomposed: 03C4 - 1FC7

Only the last one is fully supported by the conversion procedures of greekconverter because every combination is allowed in Unicode, even if it does not represent valid Greek (how should alpha + grave accent + acute accent + circumflex accent be handled on conversion?).

Unicode has a lot of advantages, no doubt, but also some drawbacks. It suffers from its attempts of being compatible to everything. So a lot of characters are defined several times with different codes, and who knows when to use which one, or to convert into what. Take, for example, the character that looks like a spacing (i.e. used as an character of its own rather than modifying the previous character) acute accent - ´ - :

• 00B4 ACUTE ACCENT: it's an acute accent (spacing), no question here.
• 0384 GREEK TONOS: the one and only accent used in modern Greek (defined here because of compatibility with ISO-8859-7?).
• 1FFD GREEK OXIA: one of the three ancient Greek accents, according to Unicode code charts identical to 00B4 ACUTE ACCENT (defined for another compatibility reason?).
• 02CA MODIFIER LETTER ACUTE ACCENT: used for high tone, primary stress, so what is the difference to 00B4 ACUTE ACCENT?
• 2032 PRIME: used as abbreviation for minutes and feet.
• 02B9 MODIFIER LETTER PRIME: used for primary stress / emphasis - so this is sort of an accent, isn't it?
• 0374 GREEK NUMERAL SIGN: indicates that Greek letters are used as numbers; Unicode code chart says its identical to 02B9 MODIFIER LETTER PRIME, but that is used for emphasis, which is something completely different.

Detailed code charts are available from the Unicode Consortium. The following charts are only to give you a first impression.

Combining Diacritical Marks (0300-036F). The grey positions have no characters assigned, the empty positions have characters that do usually not occur in Greek texts. Note that circumflex accent (0302), tilde (0303) and perispomeni (0342) are three distinct characters.	Greek Extended (1F00-1FFF). In earlier versions of the official Unicode charts the prosgegrammeni was subscripted below uppercase characters, in the current version it is adscripted (as usual in texts). This seems to be only a variation of font design.
Greek and Coptic (0370-03FF). The empty positions are the Coptic special characters which I was too lazy to draw.

What is UTF(-8, -16)?

Unicode defines only the assignment between a character and a numeric value, but not how this numeric value is stored (number of bytes, byte order etc.). For this purpose exists UTF (Unicode Transformation Format). In UTF-8, e.g., characters from the area US-ASCII are stored using only one byte. This has the advantage that these characters can be interpreted correctly even by a text editor that is not Unicode-enabled.

Betacode

7-bit safe coding using only US-ASCII characters, every diacritic is represented by a character of its own (with only a few exceptions with spacing diacritics). The example from above in Betacode: TH=| (or th=|) - equal sign represents circumflex accent, vertical bar represents iota subscript.

Greek Betacode is not case-sensitive, to denote a Greek capital letter it is prefixed with *. Some projects use only uppercase letters (e.g. TLG, for which Betacode was invented), others use only lowercase letters (e.g. the Perseus project).

I could not find out if a certain stacking order for diacritics has to be applied. But all examples I have seen so far use: breathing - accent - iota subscript resp. accent - diaeresis (the latter being different from Unicode). With Greek capital letters diacritics are placed between the * and the letter itself (e.g. *)/ARHS), with lowercase letters they are placed behind the letter (e.g. A)/RSHN).

Betacode, not unlike Unicode, encodes character functions, not character glyphs. Therefore a character glyph can have serveral encodings. The following three all look like the slash - / -:

• %3: Slash, normal Roman typographic use
• #17: Lineola obliqua, ancient editorial sign
• #804: 1/12 obol

Betacode has a lot of so-called escape sequences for editorial, papyrological, inscriptional, mathematical, musical, astronomical, metrical etc. signs and symbols. Most of them have no Unicode counterpart (at least none I know of) and greekconverter supports none of them.

Betacode key mapping in extracts

ASCII

Transliteration with ASCII characters which skips the diacritics (except rough breathing which is rendered as h) and renders some characters depending on the preceding one (e.g. alpha-ypsilon is au in most cases).

Replacement table for transliteration. Eta and omega are often simply rendered as e and o (no difference to epsilon and omicron).

HTML entities

Since version 4.0 HTML uses the Universal Character Set (UCS) which is based on the Unicode system. Since then any Unicode character can be noted as numeric entity either decimal as ü or hexadecimal as ü. For letters without accents there are named entities like α. The example from above with HTML entities: τῇ (precomposed, named und hexadecimal numeric entities) or τῇ (canonical, only decimal numeric entities).

Alternatively you can create the HTML file in Unicode format and tell the browser how to interpret the content of the file by setting the charset-property in the meta-tag in the head-section:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

BibleWorks

Proprietary 8-bit coding, optimized for displayal of Bible texts with TrueType fonts, somewhat similar to Betacode. The example from above in BibleWorks: th/|. If you use one of the Greek True Type Fonts provided with BibleWorks (© Michael Bushell), then the combining diacritics are placed above/below the previous character by means of kerning.

The key mapping of BibleWorks, derived from the Greek TrueType font Bwgrkn, compared to the Latin-1 key mapping.

SPIonic, SGreek

The TrueType fonts SPIonic (© Scholars Press) and Sgreek (© Silver Mountain Software) mostly use the character mapping of Betacode. Like in BibleWorks the diacritics are placed by kerning. There exist the following differences from Betacode:

• the character case of the code matches the case of the encoded text
• some characters have another coding than in Betacode: j=final sigma
• there are various versions of the diacritics with different degrees of kerning
• combinations of accent and breathing are defined as characters of its own, again in various versions with different kerning
• Sgreek obviously lacks digamma, but has characters which appear to be for the critical apparatus of Nestle-Aland's Greek NT

Sgreek has a whole lot more variants than SPIonic, and of course at different positions. Between Sgreek Medium and Sgreek Fixed there are some minor differences but one which is important: in Sgreek Medium, the pipe symbol | does not produce a iota subscript but a pipe symbol. You have to use #, $ and % in Sgreek Medium.

The key mapping of SPIonic. The characters with yellow background are variants with slighter kerning. Note that SPIonic does not contain digits.

The key mapping of Sgreek Fixed. The characters with yellow background have slighter kerning, the ones with red background have stronger kerning than the standard characters. The ones with the green background have the glyphs placed a bit more above the line. In some cases the Windows charmap shows something different than WinWord. I do not know which one is intended.

The conversion into SPIonic/Sgreek supports only characters that have the same key mapping in Betacode. In other words: kerning variants and combined diacritics are not supported.

GreekKeys

8-bit coding, a quasi-standard on Apple computers up to OS 9 (since then MacOS supports Unicode). It avoids kerning and uses only precomposed characters instead. This has the drawback that constructs like MNE=MA IATRO= (tomb of a physician, used in accented renderings of inscriptions) cannot be displayed.

The key mapping of GreekKeys, derived from the True Type font Athenian (© American Philological Association). Note that DisplayGreek has A(=| more consequently at position 160, whereas in Athenian it is at 170.

Character names

The official character names of Unicode are not a coding by itself, but can be done by greekconverter for human readable output of erroneous Unicode text which cannot be converted otherwise.

Others

Many other conversions may be achieved by multiple conversion. E.g. BibleWorks into GreekKeys: BibleWorks -> Unicode -> GreekKeys.

Currently not supported are codings which are invented for a single program, like Logos, WinGreek etc.

Author: Michael Neuhold (contact by e-mail)
Last change: Mar 24th 2017