Bug#904174: ITP: unibetacode -- convert classical Greek and Coptic between Beta Code and Unicode
Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: "Paul Hardy" <unifoundry@unifoundry.com>
Version: 1.0
Upstream Author: Paul Hardy
URL: http://unifoundry.com/unibetacode
License: GPL 2+, GFDL 1.3+
Programming Language: flex
Description: convert classical Greek and Coptic between Beta Code and Unicode
The unibetacode package contains two utilities primarily designed for ASCII
transliteration of classical Greek: beta2uni converts Beta Code text to UTF-8
Unicode, and uni2beta converts text from UTF-8 Unicode to Beta Code. A third
utility, unibetaprep, converts special codes for other characters (such as
Byzantine musical symbols) into four- to six-digit Unicode code points.
Beta Code is an ASCII-only encoding scheme created in the 1970s as an
efficient, intuitive digital input method for classical Greek. It provides
an easy way to enter classical Greek on a plain ASCII keyboard for conversion
to UTF-8 Unicode text. This package implements a subset of Beta Code as
specified by the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) Project at the University
of California, Irvine. The unibetacode package also is compatible with
the Beta Code implementation of the Perseus Digital Library of Tufts
University and other online repositories of classical Greek.
TLG Coptic support only includes the basic alphabet plus the jinma (grave)
accent. TLG Hebrew support only covers the basic alphabet, aleph (U+05D0)
through tav (U+05EA). To this base, unibetacode adds full Unicode coverage.
The unibetacode(5) man page describes the Beta Code file format in detail.
Files in the examples directory provide sample encodings and test data.
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