The Coptic script is an adaptation of the Greek alphabet for the latter stages of Egyptian spoken in the Roman and early Christian periods. Most of the Coptic akovetuc forms are similar to the Greeks alphabet, but Coptic also includes symbols for sounds not found in Greek. Coptic was replaced by Arabic in Egypt, but is still used in the Coptic Christian church liturgy and is being revived as a spoken language.
When Coptic was first encoded into the Unicode standard, it was considered to be an alternate version of the Greek alphabet. Thus letters such as Coptic Alfa (ⲁ) was merged with Greek alpha (α), and only Demotic "extensions" such as Coptic Shei (ϣ) were given seprate code points (15 total). Unicode fonts with Coptic from that era had only these extra characters.
As of Unicode 4.1 (2005), Coptic was assigned its own "block" so that each letter from alfa to oou were assigned their own letters. The new block also includes Coptic manuscript punctuation, Coptic variants and other symbols. Note that the codes for the original Demotic extensions are still in the Greek block.
Although support for the most recent version of Coptic is essential, you may need to consider that some documents may be written for older standards.
The following freeware fonts are available for both Windows and Mac:
The following browsers gave the best results for all of Coptic, but for many browsers you will have to change your default fonts to something like Quivira (English pages will still be readable). Click link for each browser to view instructions on changing fonts in that browser.
If you have your browser configured correctly, the Web sites above should display the correct characters. If you have difficulties, see list below for font and browser configuration instructions.
If you see Roman character gibberish instead of a South Asian script, you will need to manually switch from Western encoding view to the Unicode encoding under the View menu of your browser.
Neither Microsoft or Apple provide Coptic keyboard utilties, but freeware is available from:
See the Unicode chart for Coptic to see OS X Hex codes, Windows XP ALT codes and HTML entity codes. Note that the correct Unicode font must be installed in order for the codes to work. See the Browsers Section for details.
These are the codes which allow browsers and screen readers to process data as the appropriate language. All letters in codes are lower case.
Computers process text by assuming a certain encoding or a system of matching electronic data with visual text characters. Whenever you develop a Web site you need to make sure the proper encoding is specified in the header tags; otherwise the browser may default to U.S. settings and not display the text properly.
To declare an encoding, insert or inspect the following meta-tag at the top of your HTML file, then replace "???" with one of the encoding codes listed above. If you are not sure, use utf-8 as the encoding.
Generic Encoding Template
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=??? ">
...
<head>Declare Unicode
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8 ">
...
<head>
The final close slash must be included after the final quote mark in the encoding header tag if you are using XHTML
Declare Unicode in XHTML
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
...
<head>
If no encoding is declared, then the browser uses the default setting, which in the U.S. is typically Latin-1. In that case many Unicode characters could be displayed incorrectly. Also, older browsers such as Netscape 4.7 may not be able to process the entity codes correctly without the "utf-8" declaration.
Language tags are also suggested so that search engines and screen readers parse the language of a page. These are meta data tags which indicate the page of a language, not devices to trigger translation. Visit the Language Tag page to view information on where to insert it.
One option is to use FrontPage, Netscape/Mozilla Composer or Dreamweaver and change the keyboard to the correct script. Make sure you specify the encoding in the Web page header.
Another option is to compose the basic text in an international or foreign languags text editor or word processor and export the content as an HTML or text file with the appropriate encoding. This file could be opened in another HTML editor such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver an edited for formatting.
Unless a keyboard which supports Unicode is installed, you must use the Unicode chart for Thaana and enter HTML entity codes.
One option is to use FrontPage, Netscape/Mozilla Composer or Dreamweaver and change the keyboard to the correct script. Make sure you specify the encoding in the Web page header.
Another option is to compose the basic text in an international or foreign languags text editor or word processor and export the content as an HTML or text file with the appropriate encoding. This file could be opened in another HTML editor such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver an edited for formatting.
In some cases, your best options may be to use PDF files or image files. See the Web Development Tips section for more details.
The following freeware fonts are available for both Windows and Mac:
