Open Source Languages Software

Before Unicode, there were several competing character encodings for the Coptic script. For instance, one group of fonts might map Coptic letters Γγ to Latin keys Gg, while another group might map them to Latin keys Jj. There are several reasons for the user to opt for legacy rather than Unicode encodings. Two deserve special mention. First, there are certain marks used in Biblical and other textual criticism that do not appear in Unicode; second, it is far easier to type in a legacy encoding and then turn it into Unicode than to type directly in Unicode. This package aims to act as a stepping stone to Unicode, by including several legacy fonts hard-coded to take advantage of the multiple encodings, as well as a UNIX shell script, in multiple shell languages, to transcode between these encodings. All twelve encodings in wide use are supported. The fonts in this package are compatible with many operating systems; the shell scripts support Mac and Linux (more soon).