BETA2UNI(1)

💖 BETA2UNI 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the beta2uni(1) glow-up, from the General Commands Manual, no less 💅

✨ NAME ✨

beta2uni — the girlies' fave little converter that takes a polytonic Greek document and turns it from Beta Code into UTF-8. slay.

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

beta2uni [-b] [-i input_file.utf8] [-o output_file.beta]

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so beta2uni(1) reads a document that's encoded in Beta Code and converts it to UTF-8 Unicode. and what is Beta Code, you ask? it's an ASCII-only encoding scheme, and it's literally the most commonly used way to digitally represent polytonic Greek. iconic behavior honestly.

Beta Code has become a widely-adopted standard for encoding classical Greek. it was developed by David Packard back in the 1970s, and then adopted by the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) Project at the University of California, Irvine, like, right after. later on, in the 1980s, the Perseus Project adopted it too (originally at Harvard University, now at Tufts University), and so did many other collections of classical and Koine Greek. and now? the TLG corpus alone contains over 100 million words from classical to Byzantine Greek. a hundred MILLION. main character energy fr fr 😭👑

here's the tea: the TLG uses uppercase Latin letters, and the Perseus Project uses lowercase. beta2uni(1) will accept either. we don't play favorites here 🫶

many classicists who use Beta Code have been actively involved in The Unicode Standard, with evolving recommendations for mapping between Beta Code and Unicode. so beta2uni(1) is out here providing a capability for GNU/Linux users who wish to convert Beta Code texts to Unicode. serving the community 💖

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

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

• -b — begins the UTF-8 output file with the UTF-8 encoding of the Unicode Byte Order Mark, U+FFFE. this is not the default, bestie, so don't come for me when it's not there 🙈
• -i — specify the input file. the default is STDIN.
• -o — specify the output file. the default is STDOUT.
• -v — prints the program version and exits. bye 👋
• --version — prints the program version and exits. same vibe, longer name 💅

🎀 sample usage 🎀

beta2uni -i my_input_file.beta -o my_output_file.utf8

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🌈 FILES 🌈

ASCII text files using Beta Code to encode polytonic Greek. that's the whole vibe.

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💜 SEE ALSO 💜

unibetaprep(1), uni2beta(1), libunibetacode(3), unibetacode(5)

like, go read those too, iykyk 🧚

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

beta2uni was written by Paul Hardy. thank you king 🫡

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📜 LICENSE 📜

beta2uni is Copyright © 2018, 2019, 2020 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.

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💀 BUGS 💀

No known bugs exist. not a single one. we're literally perfect. ✨

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! this was BETA2UNI(1) from the General Commands Manual, dated 2018 Jun 23 — mwah, sending you all the beta-to-unicode love 💖🎀🦋🌸