Windows-1253


Windows code page 1253, commonly known by its IANA-registered name Windows-1253 or abbreviated as cp1253, is a Microsoft Windows code page used to write modern Greek. It is not capable of supporting the older polytonic Greek.
It is not fully compatible with ISO 8859-7 because a few characters, including the letter Ά, are located at different byte values:
  • µ and are added at their locations from Windows-1252 and ISO 8859-1. This collides with the locations of ΅ and Ά, respectively, in ISO 8859-7.
  • ‘ and ’ are moved from their ISO 8859-7 locations to their Windows-1252 locations. The displaced ΅ and Ά are moved to the vacated space at 0xA1 and 0xA2 respectively.
  • ¤ and ¥ are added at their locations from Windows-1252 and ISO 8859-1. This collides with additions made to ISO 8859-7 in 2003, when € and ₯ respectively were added to the same locations. The € was added to Windows-1253 at 0x80, the same location which it was added to in Windows-1252. An iota subscript was also added to ISO 8859-7 at 0xAA; this remains unallocated in Windows-1253.
  • Several further characters are added at their Windows-1252 locations, although the rest do not collide with ISO 8859-7.
IBM uses code page 1253 for Windows-1253.
Unicode is preferred for Greek in modern applications, especially as UTF-8 encoding on the Internet. Unicode provides many more glyphs for complete coverage, see Greek alphabet in Unicode and Ancient Greek Musical Notation for tables.

Character set

The following table shows Windows-1253. Each character is shown with its Unicode equivalent.