NAME

       beta2uni - Convert a polytonic Greek document from Beta Code to UTF-8

SYNOPSIS

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

DESCRIPTION

       beta2uni(1)  reads  a  document  encoded using Beta Code and converts it to UTF-8 Unicode.
       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.   beta2uni(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.   beta2uni(1)
       provides a capability for GNU/Linux users who wish to convert Beta Code texts to Unicode.

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

OPTIONS

       -b          Begin the UTF-8 output file with the UTF-8 encoding of the Unicode Byte  Order
                   Mark, U+FFFE.  This is not the default.

       -i          Specify the input file. The default is STDIN.

       -o          Specify the output file. The default is STDOUT.

       -v          Print the program version and exit.

       --version   Print the program version and exit.

       Sample usage:

              beta2uni -i my_input_file.beta -o my_output_file.utf8

FILES

       ASCII text files using Beta Code to encode polytonic Greek.

SEE ALSO

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

AUTHOR

       beta2uni was written by Paul Hardy.

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.

BUGS

       No known bugs exist.

                                           2018 Jun 23                                BETA2UNI(1)