NAME

       unibetaprep - Pre-process Beta Code files for beta2uni(1)

SYNOPSIS

       unibetaprep [-i input_file.pre] [-o output_file.beta]

DESCRIPTION

       unibetaprep(1) reads a document encoded using Beta Code that may contain special character
       codes from the full Beta Code of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae  (TLG)  specification,  and
       converts  it  to  a  Beta Code file that has those special characters converted to Unicode
       escape sequences.  This departs from the traditional encoding of those special  characters
       in favor of Unicode code point assignments.

       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:

              unibetaprep -i my_input_file.pre -o my_output_file.beta

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

FILES

       ASCII text files using Beta Code to encode polytonic Greek.

SEE ALSO

       beta2uni(1), uni2beta(1), unibetacode(5)

AUTHOR

       unibetaprep was written by Paul Hardy.

LICENSE

       unibetaprep is Copyright © 2018 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.

BUGS

       No known bugs exist.

                                           2019 Jan 26                             UNIBETAPREP(1)