Greek alphabet: Encyclopedia II - Greek alphabet - Greek encodings

Greek alphabet - Greek encodings

A variety of encodings have been used for Greek online, many of them documented in RFC 1947 "Greek Character Encoding for Electronic Mail Messages".

The two principal ones still used today are ISO/IEC 8859-7 and Unicode. ISO 8859-7 supports only monotonic orthography; Unicode supports polytonic orthography.

Greek alphabet - Greek in Unicode

Unicode supports polytonic orthography well enough for ordinary continuous text in modern and ancient Greek, and even many archaic forms for epigraphy. With the use of combining characters, Unicode also supports Greek philology and dialectology and various other specialized requirements. However, most current implementations of Unicode do not support combining characters well, so, though alpha with macron and acute can be represented as U+03B1 U+0304 U+0301, this rarely renders well: ᾱ́.

For extended discussion of problematic Greek letter forms in Unicode see Greek Unicode Issues.

There are 2 main blocks of Greek characters in Unicode. The first is "Greek and Coptic" (U+0370 — U+03FF). This block is based on ISO 8859-7 and is sufficient to write Modern Greek. There are also some archaic letters and Greek-based technical symbols.

This block also supports the Coptic language. Formerly most Coptic letters shared codepoints with similar-looking Greek letters; but in many scholarly works, both scripts occur, with quite different letter shapes, so as of Unicode 4.1, Coptic and Greek were disunified. Those Coptic letters with no Greek equivalents still remain in this block.

To write polytonic Greek, one may use combining diacritical marks or the precomposed characters in the "Greek Extended" block (U+1F00 – U+1FFF).

Combining and spacing (letter-free) diacritical marks pertaining to Greek language are:

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Greek encodings", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki