Cork encoding

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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]

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.

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

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

• Encoding file
• Overview of encodings in LaTeX