Cork encoding

The Cork (also known as T1 or EC) encoding is a character encoding used for encoding glyphs in fonts.^[1] It is named after the city of Cork in Ireland, where during a TeX Users Group (TUG) conference in 1990 a new encoding was introduced for LaTeX.^[1] It contains 256 characters supporting most west- and east-European languages with the Latin alphabet.^[2]

Details

In 8-bit TeX engines the font encoding has to match the encoding of hyphenation patterns where this encoding is most commonly used.^[3] In LaTeX one can switch to this encoding with \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}, while in ConTeXt MkII this is the default encoding already. In modern engines such as XeTeX and LuaTeX Unicode is fully supported and the 8-bit font encodings are obsolete.

Character set

Cork encoding

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

A

B

C

D

E

F

0x

` 0060

´ 00B4

ˆ 02C6

˜ 02DC

¨ 00A8

˝ 02DD

˚ 02DA

ˇ 02C7

˘ 02D8

¯ 00AF

˙ 02D9

¸ 00B8

˛ 02DB

‚ 201A

‹ 2039

› 203A

1x

“ 201C

” 201D

„ 201E

« 00AB

» 00BB

– 2013

— 2014

ZWSP[a] 200B

₀[b] 2080

ı[c] 0131

ȷ[c] 0237

ff FB00

fi FB01

fl FB02

ffi FB03

ffl FB04

2x

SP

!

"

#

$

%

&

’ 2019

(

)

*

+

,

-

.

/

3x

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

:

;

<

=

>

?

4x

@

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

5x

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z

[

\

]

^

_

6x

‘ 2018

a

b

c

d

e

f

g

h

i

j

k

l

m

n

o

7x

p

q

r

s

t

u

v

w

x

y

z

{

|

}

~

SHY[d]

8x

Ă 0102

Ą 0104

Ć 0106

Č 010C

Ď 010E

Ě 011A

Ę 0118

Ğ 011E

Ĺ 0139

Ľ 013D

Ł 0141

Ń 0143

Ň 0147

Ŋ 014A

Ő 0150

Ŕ 0154

9x

Ř 0158

Ś 015A

Š 0160

Ş 015E

Ť 0164

Ţ 0162

Ű 0170

Ů 016E

Ÿ 0178

Ź 0179

Ž 017D

Ż 017B

IJ 0132

İ 0130

đ 0111

§ 00A7

Ax

ă 0103

ą 0105

ć 0107

č 010D

ď 010F

ě 011B

ę 0119

ğ 011F

ĺ 013A

ľ 013E

ł 0142

ń 0144

ň 0148

ŋ 014B

ő 0151

ŕ 0155

Bx

ř 0159

ś 015B

š 0161

ş 015F

ť 0165

ţ 0163

ű 0171

ů 016F

ÿ 00FF

ź 017A

ž 017E

ż 017C

ij 0133

¡ 00A1

¿ 00BF

£ 00A3

Cx

À

Á

Â

Ã

Ä

Å

Æ

Ç

È

É

Ê

Ë

Ì

Í

Î

Ï

Dx

Ð[e]

Ñ

Ò

Ó

Ô

Õ

Ö

Π0152

Ø

Ù

Ú

Û

Ü

Ý

Þ

SS[f] 1E9E

Ex

à

á

â

ã

ä

å

æ

ç

è

é

ê

ë

ì

í

î

ï

Fx

ð

ñ

ò

ó

ô

õ

ö

œ 0153

ø

ù

ú

û

ü

ý

þ

ß 00DF

Notes

• Hexadecimal values under the characters in the table are the Unicode character codes.
• The first 12 characters are often used as combining characters.

1. 0x17 is dubbed a “compound word mark” (CWM) in the Cork encoding, and is an innovation of this standard. It is an invisible character that separates compounds in a complex word, for instance in German, in order to disallow esthetic ligatures at compound boundaries.^[2] It is mapped to the Unicode “zero-width space” (ZWSP, U+200B), defined at about the same time, whose purpose is similar, if not identical.
2. 0x18 is a “small o”, used to compose ‰ or ‱ (or arbitrary smaller quantities) out of percent sign (%).^[2]
3. Dotless i and dotless j may be used to compose accented variants like i with macron (ī).
4. 0x7F is the hyphenation character, not really a soft hyphen (SHY) as defined by Unicode.
5. 0xD0 is used both as Eth (Ð, U+00D0) and as D with stroke (Đ, U+0110) which might be a problem at some occasions (like copying text from PDF, hyphenation, ...)
6. 0xDF contains SS (two letters S). It allows TeX to automatically convert the German lowercase ß into the uppercase form.

Supported languages

The encoding supports most European languages written in Latin alphabet. Notable exceptions are:

• Esperanto and Maltese language (using IL3)
• Latvian language and Lithuanian language (using L7X)
• Welsh language

Languages with slightly suboptimal support include:

• Galician language, Portuguese language and Spanish language – due to the lack of characters ª and º, which are not superscript versions of lowercase "a" and "o" (superscripts are thinner) and they are often underlined
• Croatian language, Bosnian language, Serbian language – due to the shared use of the slot for Đ
• Turkish language – due to dotless i having different uppercase and lowercase combinations than in other languages