This is the README file for the unibetacode package.

Information about the latest version is in the NEWS file.

This package contains utilities for conversion of polytonic Greek
between Beta Code and Unicode UTF-8 formats.

Version 2.0 added the libunibetacode library with functions
to convert between Greek, Coptic, and Hebrew Beta Code and
UTF-8 Unicode.  See the libunibetacode(3) man page for details.

Beta code is a plain ASCII encoding scheme developed in the
the 1970s for representing classical Greek.  It is the standard
encoding scheme employed by many Greek classical manuscript
repositories, including the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae Project
at the University of California, Irvine, and the Perseus
Digital Library Project at Tufts University.

Two programs written in flex(1) provide this Beta Code to
Unicode conversion.  The sources are in the src directory:

     - unibetaprep  converts custom TLG numeric codes

     - beta2uni     converts Beta Code documents to UTF-8

     - uni2beta     converts UTF-8 documents to Beta Code

If you downloaded this source package, instructions for
building and installation can be found in the INSTALL file
and license information is in the COPYING file.

If you are a downstream maintainer porting this package
to a new architecture, you can remove all files that
Autotools added with the command

     autoreconf -f -i && ./configure && make orig

In all other cases, typing the following command will
usually build the software on your system:

     ./configure
     make

Then test that the programs are operating correctly by running

     make check

This testing uses files in the "examples" directory to check for
proper operation of the unibetaprep, beta2uni, and uni2beta programs
on the target system.  Files in "examples" directory ending in ".beta"
are in Beta Code format; those ending in ".utf8" are in Unicode UTF-8
format.  Those files can serve as useful samples.

The "greek-beta.txt" file in the "examples" directory is an ASCII
table showing each Unicode code point in the Greek Extended block,
U+1F00..U+1FFF, that the library functions will translate to polytonic
Unicode code points.

Further information on these programs and the Beta Code format that
they implement is contained in the following man pages, located in
the "man" directory, which are installed during package installation:

     unibetaprep(1)

     beta2uni(1)

     uni2beta(1)

     unibetacode(5)


Consult the INSTALL file for detailed installation instructions.

To install the programs and man pages on your system, edit the top-level
Makefile to define the destination directories.  Then type

     make install

By default, binaries will be installed in /usr/local/bin and man pages
will be installed in /usr/local/share/man.


LICENSE
--------

The license is contained in the COPYING file.  A summary of the license
appears below.

      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.

      This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
      but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
      MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
      GNU General Public License for more details.

      You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
      along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.


