unibetacode

About unibetacode

From Debian's package description

The unibetacode package contains two utilities primarily designed for ASCII transliteration of classical Greek: beta2uni converts Beta Code text to UTF-8 Unicode, and uni2beta converts text from UTF-8 Unicode to Beta Code. A third utility, unibetaprep, converts special codes for other characters (such as Byzantine musical symbols) into four- to six-digit Unicode code points.

Beta Code is an ASCII-only encoding scheme created in the 1970s as an efficient, intuitive digital input method for classical Greek. It provides an easy way to enter classical Greek on a plain ASCII keyboard for conversion to UTF-8 Unicode text. This package implements a subset of Beta Code as specified by the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) Project at the University of California, Irvine. The unibetacode package also is compatible with the Beta Code implementation of the Perseus Digital Library of Tufts University and other online repositories of classical Greek.

TLG Coptic support only includes the basic alphabet plus the jinma (grave) accent. TLG Hebrew support only covers the basic alphabet, aleph (U+05D0) through tav (U+05EA). To this base, unibetacode adds full Unicode coverage. The unibetacode(5) man page describes the Beta Code file format in detail. Files in the examples directory provide sample encodings and test data.

From Debian's description of the unibetacode package, under that package's license.