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DESCRIPTION¶

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. unibetaprep(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. unibetaprep(1) provides a capability for GNU/Linux users who wish to convert Beta Code texts to Unicode.

The most notable range of special characters in the TLG specification is the complete range of Byzantine Musical Symbols, in the Unicode range U+1D000 through U+1D0FF, inclusive. This range corresponds to the TLG special character encodings "#2000" through "#2245", respectively. If a character sequence in the TLG Beta Code specification corresponds to a Unicode glyph or glyph combination, unibetaprep should handle the translation correctly.

Most of these Beta Code sequences consist of a "#", "%", "<", ">", "[", or "]" character followed by one or more decimal digits. Sequences corresponding to idiosyncratic Beta Code glyphs are not translated to Unicode. The Beta Code quotation mark sequences "1, "2, "4, and "5 are converted to represent Unicode code points U+201E, U+201C, U+201A, and U+201B, respectively. For other special code sequences, consult the TLG Beta Code Quick Reference Guide, or examine the flex program source in file unibetaprep.l.

The output of unibetaprep is designed to provide the input to beta2uni(1), which then produces UTF-8 Unicode output.

Note: Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and TLG are registered trademarks of the University of California.

OPTIONS¶

-i

Specify the input file. The default is STDIN.

-o

Specify the output file. The default is STDOUT.

Sample usage:

The output file, my_output_file.beta, can then be used as input for beta2uni(1) for conversion into a UTF-8 Unicode document.

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LICENSE¶

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.

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