| BETA2UNI(1) | General Commands Manual | BETA2UNI(1) |
beta2uni - Convert a polytonic Greek document from Beta Code to UTF-8
beta2uni [-b] [-i input_file.utf8] [-o output_file.beta]
beta2uni(1) reads a document encoded using Beta Code and converts it to UTF-8 Unicode. Beta Code is an ASCII-only encoding scheme most commonly used for digital representation of polytonic Greek.
Beta Code has become a widely-adopted standard for encoding classical Greek. It was developed by David Packard in the 1970s and adopted by the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) Project at the University of California, Irvine shortly thereafter. This encoding was later adopted by the Perseus Project in the 1980s (originally at Harvard University, now at Tufts University) and by many other collections of classical and Koine Greek. Today, the TLG corpus alone contains over 100 million words from classical to Byzantine Greek.
The TLG uses uppercase Latin letters; the Perseus Project uses lowercase. beta2uni(1) will accept either.
Many classicists who use Beta Code have been actively involved in The Unicode Standard, with evolving recommendations for mapping between Beta Code and Unicode. beta2uni(1) provides a capability for GNU/Linux users who wish to convert Beta Code texts to Unicode.
Note: Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and TLG are registered trademarks of the University of California.
Sample usage:
ASCII text files using Beta Code to encode polytonic Greek.
beta2uni was written by Paul Hardy.
beta2uni is Copyright © 2018 Paul Hardy.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
No known bugs exist.
| 2018 Jun 23 |